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ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 



ESSAYS FOR TIIE DAY 



BY 



THEODORE tV HUNGER 



/ 




BOSTON A>rD NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON. MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(Cbe lliterinDe pccf jtf, Cambcibse 

1904 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Coules Received 

APR 7 1904 

Cooyrlirht Entry 

■^|^.\. . ^ ~ ^f w- 

CLAS3 -^ XXc. No. 

S 2 -^ 3 

COPY B 






COPYRIGHT 1904 BY THEODORE T. MVNGER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



I'ttblisheJ April ig04 



TO 

n. K. M. 



Grateful acknowledgment is made by the author to 
The Century Company for permission to use in this 
volume the fifth essay ; and to The Outlook Com- 
pany for the use of the fourth and sixth essays. 



CONTENTS 



PAOB 



The Church : Some Immediate Questions . . 1 
The Interplay of Christianity and Literature 63 
Notes on the Scarlet Letter . . 103 
The Secret of Horace Bushnell . . . 155 
A Layman's Reflections on Music . . . 183 
A Cock to ^sculapius 215 



THE CHURCH: 
SOME IMMEDIATE QUESTIONS 



" It is a blessed thing that in all times, and never more richly 
than in the Reformation days, there have always been other men 
to whom religion has not presented itself as a system of doctrine, 
but as an elemental life in which the soul of man came into very 
direct and close communion with the soul of God. It is the mys- 
tics of every age who have done most to blend the love of truth 
and the love of man within the love of God, and so to keep alive 
or to restore a healthy tolerance. . . . 

" Confused, irregular, forever turning inside out, forever going 
back upon itself, the history of Christianity, however superficially 
we glance at it, seems to bear witness to three things, — first, that 
every hard bigotry is always on the brink of turning into toler- 
ance, and every loose tolerance of hardening into bigotry ; second, 
that on the whole, positive belief and tolerance are struggling 
toward a final harmony ; and third, that true tolerance belongs 
with profound piety and earnest spiritual life." — Bishop Phillips 
Bbooks, Tolerance, pp. 35 and 37. 

" As soon as the pure doctrine and love of Christ are compre- 
hended in their true nature, and have become a vital principle, we 
shall feel ourselves as human beings, great and free, and not at- 
tach especial importance to a degree more or less in the outward 
forms of religion : besides, we shall all gradually advance from a 
Christianity of words and faith to a Christianity of feeling and 
action." — Gobthb. 



THE CHURCH: SOME IMMEDIATE 
QUESTIONS 

The last census informs us that there are in 
the United States one hundred and forty- 
seven religious denominations. Our curiosity 
is piqued as to the reason for this multiplicity 
and presumable diversity. If " nothing walks 
with aimless feet," may there not be some 
divine purpose and scientific reason in this 
prodigal outburst of religious energy? It shows 
at least in how many forms the instinct of re- 
ligion reveals itself, and how surely the hopes 
and fears and aspirations of mankind turn to 
religion for answer. Trivial as these sects 
often appear, they by no means reveal a weak 
side of human nature, but rather — if any 
criticism be made — a crude and untaught 
side. It is interesting also to note the central 
ideas out of which they spring. Yet few of 
them are original. All are based on Scripture 
read with literal exactness, and the special 



4 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

points usually refer to baptism, prophecy, the 
form of the Church, eschatology, and not a 
few involve the knottiest points in metaphy- 
sical theology, — such as a sect in Texas that 
flourishes under the name, " Old Two-Seed- 
in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists." Others 
are perpetuations of the controversies of the 
Reformation, while the will and divine sov- 
ereignty and election — conditioned or un- 
conditioned — are debated and reconciled as 
of yore. The proper day for the Sabbath and 
the millennium each represents a denomina- 
tion, while the speedy end of the world stands 
for quite an enduring church that couples 
with its expectation " the sleep of the dead." 
These stand chiefly for outspoken beliefs of 
what lie hidden in the creeds of the older and 
greater churches, — survivals of what may stiU 
be found in ecclesiastical libraries. 

This state of things had an early beginning. 
The New World was baptized in religion. 
Columbus no sooner touched the shore than 
he planted the cross. Church and conquest 
swept over the continent, — the grace of one 
poorly redeeming the cruelty of the other. 
The Church came to Jamestown with a full 
quota of clergy along with more vagabonds ; 



THE CHURCH 5 

and a hard time Governor Berkeley had with 
them, but he thanked God that in addition to 
these troubles there were no schools. In Mary- 
land, the Church fared somewhat better. In 
its first decade it won the distinction of open- 
ing the way in London to the establishment 
of the first foreign missionary society in the 
world. There also the CathoHc Church found 
permanent footing, and spread an odor of 
toleration that stiU sweetens the air. The 
Friends found peaceful lodgment in Penn- 
sylvania, where they multiplied, — dividing at 
last into two bands, — but have nearly run 
their race, having borne clear witness to the 
eternal truth of the Spirit. The Dutch brought 
to New York the Church as set forth by the 
Synod of Dort, while the Scotch stood by the 
Westminster Confession. The Pilgrims and 
the Puritans brought the latter with them, 
and also a fuU-fledged democracy that gave 
the keynote to the nation and dominates it 
still. Or, as Lowell puts it : " Puritanism, 
believing itself quick with the seed of reli- 
gious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the 
egg of democracy." 

These were the few first sources of the 
Church in America, but hardly a generation 



6 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

had passed before the churches began to 
divide and to make room for others, until 
there came to be the present variety and mul- 
tiplicity. 

How shall we explain this strange phenom- 
enon? Is it due to the fact that when the 
early settlers found themselves free in matters 
of rehgion they leaped exultingly into the 
privilege? Or did the break with the Old 
World dissolve all ties as the people came to 
realize that their whole life was to be here 
and must be suffered to shape itself in all 
things as it would ? Doubtless this unre- 
strained play of the individual mind had 
much to do with it, and — being without king 
or bishop — they found a peculiar satisfaction 
in cleaving a denomination in twain, or in 
founding one without a hierarchy. 

But not all the organizations named in the 
census are to be accounted as churches. Some 
do not belong to the solar system, — wander- 
ing stars thrown out of orbital movement by 
some dreamer who had a vision, or has dis- 
covered new meaning in a Greek particle ; 
their significance, though numerically large, 
is too slight to call for measurement. And 
there are churches — notably the Mormon — 



THE CHUKCH 7 

SO monstrous and so remote from religion that 
one is tempted to say of them what Blake said 
of the tiger, " Did he who made the lamb 
make thee ? " And others — such as the Chris- 
tian Scientist — that have not sufficiently 
emerged from their humorous and tragical 
absurdities to justify their claim to be called 
a church. In what follows we shall speak of 
churches, denominations, and sects as inter- 
changeable terms, — only declining to use the 
definite article as the special property of any 
one organization. Nor shall we use much 
space in deahng with the older contentions of 
the churches. Earnest and intelligent men 
to-day do not discuss the apostolic succession, 
nor the forms of baptism, nor endless punish- 
ment, nor the verbal inspiration of Scripture. 
The banners that used to wave with vigor 
over these doctrines are still carried, but the 
battles do not rage around them ; indeed, there 
are no battles beyond slight skirmishes, — 
only questions as to what is best to be done. 
Perhaps the most immediate question now be- 
fore the churches pertains to this multiplicity 
already mentioned. 

If it be the evil that it is generally assumed 
to be, it is still possible that there may be 



8 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

some soul of goodness in it if we will observ- 
ingly distill it out. It should moderate crit- 
icism to remember that if it is an evil it is an 
inevitable one. The Church can neither keep 
out evils nor immediately rectify those that 
are in. The first point in the complaint is that 
the multiplicity engenders rivalry and hatred; 
but rivalry is not hatred. It is only the fer- 
ment at the root that starts the sap along its 
organic path to the branches. Hatred is of the 
devil, but rivalry is the spice of human enter- 
prise. Besides, it is not true that the denomi- 
nations hate one another, except in small 
towns where all bounds of reason are passed 
and intolerance holds full sway. The picture 
of a Western village with a church for every 
hundred people is a distressing one ; but take 
any city. East or West, and the picture 
changes. That it is over-churched is the least 
evil it is to be charged with. That there are 
two churches of different denominations side 
by side is a slight matter in comparison with 
the fact that there are parties and conflicting 
schools of thought in all denominations — 
most of all in those which make the loudest 
claim to unity — that test the spirit of charity 
far more keenly than ecclesiastical separation. 



THE CHURCH 9 

A Calvinistic and an Arminlan church side by 
side keep good fellowship in comparison with 
churches that differ over high and low, or old 
and new school. Fences are no enemy to good 
neighborhood, but their absence often is. The 
fact that " France has forty soups and one 
religion, while England has forty rehgions and 
but one soup " is no sign that the former is 
the more godly nation. Were there in France 
no Holy Catholic Church, or along with it a 
multitude of true churches, and were there in 
England no Established Church, but as many 
as the people chose to make, both nations 
would be happier and better than they seem 
to be at present. It is the unalterable con- 
viction of all believers, and of all thinkers 
as well, that the Church is one, and that 
reUgion is one ; it is as fixed as the unity of 
God, and is because of his unity, but it is 
always an open question as to what consti- 
tutes oneness. As God is infinitely complex 
in form but one in spirit, so religion may wear 
many forms and bear many names, and yet 
have one spirit. Complexity is not the enemy 
of unity ; it is rather the cause of it, but the 
unity is of another kind than form or name. 
The multiplicity may be excessive, and then 



10 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

the bramble and forest must yield to make 
room for better and fewer growths. But the 
world is slowly finding out that the less the 
State meddles with the Church, and the less 
churches meddle with one another, the better 
it is for all concerned. Religion is an ethereal 
thing, so personal and sacred that every fine 
soul holds it to be a matter between himself 
and God. 

No mistake can be greater than to suppose 
that shutting up religious truths in binding 
forms — either of creed or church — acts 
otherwise than as a fetter. Forms preserve but 
deaden. They provoke a return to the heresies 
against which they protest, and rebelhon 
against the authority which binds them. The 
general outcry against the denominational 
spirit, unlovely and unthrifty as it is, would, 
if it should prevail, shut the churches up 
within barriers sure to be soon broken down, 
or drive them into the open desert of total 
unbelief. There is one thing that man loves 
more than religion, and that is freedom : he 
has an instinct for each, but the latter condi- 
tions the former ; when it is cramped religion 
itself shrivels. 

Before we let our thoughts and plans go too 



THE CHURCH U 

far in bemoaning the long list, it would be 
well to assure ourselves that it is a cause for 
regret. " Our unhappy divisions," as they are 
sometimes called, might be more unhappy if 
they were absorbed in large unions. The ex- 
periment of uniting the Prussian Evangelical 
Church with the churches of the other Ger- 
man States — all holding substantially the 
same faith — has not proved a success. The 
General Superintendent, Poetter, recently 
said : " I am not sure it is such a good thing. 
We have only put on one uniform, and are 
not more really united in spirit and doctrine 
than before ; " and he adds these timely 
words : "Why should all the regiments be 
dressed alike or have one name ? Zeal is often 
more stimulated when each body of Christians 
has the greatest opportunity to develop its own 
individuality." It is an interesting fact that 
these united bodies of Lutheran churches are 
at variance over the question as to the best 
method of holding their own against the Ro- 
man Catholics, — a question not impossible 
here in the future ; in which case it is clear 
that the smaller the denomination that takes 
it up the better for all concerned, as it has all 
the elements of a long and bitter quarrel. 



12 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

Nor should it be forgotten that a union for 
the sake of economy and effectiveness over- 
looks not only the fact that a union in belief 
could not thus be secured, but also if gained 
might develop and bring to the front once 
more the differences. These differences are 
real and do but sleep. The broadest line of 
cleavasre in doctrinal belief in the Protestant 
churches in this country is that between Cal- 
vinism and Arminianism. Edwards devoted 
his great powers to stemming the growing tide 
of the latter, but in vain. He is honored by 
scholars and historians for his greatness and 
his service to the State, as his centuries come 
round, but the multitude is insensible to him 
while it pours out millions of money in memory 
of Wesley. The majority still confess the 
Westminster Creed, but while Presbyterians 
and Methodists live peacefully side by side and 
work effectively in social reforms — hardly 
knowing any difference — if they were organ- 
ically related, not to say united, the mixture of 
oil and water would but feebly describe their 
condition, so fundamentally do they differ. 
The proverb, " Do not stir up a sleeping dog," 
is not invidious, but prudent. 

It would be equally diHicult to bring the 



THE CHURCH 13 

Congregational churclies to a fresh assent to 
the Westminster Confession, to which the Pres- 
byterian Church has recently renewed its ad- 
herence with some slisfht chang-es. Fraternal 
in their relations even to the extent of an open 
path between their pulpits, the number of 
Congregational ministers is steadily lessening 
who are ready to assent to the Confession in 
order to fill them. But greater hindrances to 
union than this stand in the way. The im- 
mediate and pressing question in the New 
England Congregational churches is, — Can 
the schism of a century ago be healed? If 
there is reason for union anywhere it is here. 
There are signs as deep as the yearning of 
heart for heart, and reasons as weighty as the 
fact that what ought not to have happened 
ought not to continue, why this mutual move- 
ment — if it can yet be called such — should 
be fostered and consummated when the hour 
is ripe, far off though it be. 

Conditions should be well considered when 
such a question as a general union or federa- 
tion of denominations is proposed. If there is 
to be union, it should not be made on a basis 
of mere economy and technical effectiveness, 
but on congeniality of thought and feeling. 



14 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

on like ethical and spiritual conceptions, on 
sympathy with humanity in its highest and 
most pressing needs, and — not a slight matter 
— on historic affiliations. It may be roughly 
said that if you prick the skin of a Congrega- 
tionalist — orthodox or liberal — you will find 
a Puritan. There is need enough of him to- 
day, and he is still here, — ready for action if 
the needless schism were overcome. If there 
is reason for union anywhere in the wide world 
of denominations, it is where the disjecta 
membra of ancient Congregationalism are 
scattered in New England ; but if it implies 
also union with denominations that still cher- 
ish the dogmas against which the Unitarians 
long ago justly protested, it would defeat the 
most desirable movement in the churches now 
in sight. 

The era of division or separation seems to 
be drawing to an end. It is doubtful if we 
soon shall see another denomination of im- 
portance that can be called Christian. There 
is great activity in the theological world, but 
it does not move in the direction of creedal 
organization. There is no less theology, — for 
theology will never go out of fashion, — but it 
looks toward explanation if not toward extinc- 



THE CHURCH 15 

tion of existing creeds, and to other changes 
that drop out or reinterpret old meanings and 
bring in new. Careful distinctions and defini- 
tions that determine the exact amount of free- 
dom or necessity in the will are disregarded, 
because Christian faith is not now approached 
on that side of our nature. Emphasis is trans- 
ferred from the field of speculation, where 
chiefly the denominations originated, to the 
field of action, to psychology and human so- 
ciety. The pressure of the past is less felt, or 
is felt as reverence rather than as authority. 
The fact of change — whatever its cause — 
can no longer be resisted, and the chief ques- 
tion that burdens thoughtful minds in the 
Church is, at what speed and by what road 
will it move into the region where it must go ; 
also, what shall be left behind and what car- 
ried forward? The main question of all is, 
how to retain steadiness of mind in the con- 
fusion and rush that fill the air. Serious 
minds tremble before the changfes that come 
thundering down upon them. 

Not less perplexing is a sudden apparent 
dying out of interest in the churches, with 
corresponding indifference to religion in those 
classes where one would expect it to abide. 



16 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

Reasons of widest variety are given to account 
for this strange lapse and confusion which we 
take to be the chief feature of the reHgious 
condition of the Church at present. The 
causes of tenest alleged are evolution in science 
and the higher criticism. The vast majority 
of those who compose our one hundred and 
forty-seven denominations fail to comprehend 
their import beyond that they stand for 
change, which is always the signal for fear 
and outcry among the ignorant. But the more 
intelligent class, who perceive how thoroughly 
evolution modifies all thought and theories, 
and at the same time find it hardly recognized, 
or named only to be denounced in the pulpits, 
stay away, — not because evolution is not 
preached, but because the whole order of 
thought pertaining to it is passed by, and 
they find themselves in a dead world and out 
of gear with all that is said and with most of 
what is done. In the long run the man of 
thought will worship in the world in which he 
thinks ; and the more thoughtful he is, the 
more difficult he finds it to cooperate with a 
chiu-ch that denies the ruling ideas and ac- 
cepted facts that he encounters every day and 
receives as bis own. 



THE CHURCH 17 

The same thiDg happens in connection with 
the higher criticism. It calls for reconsidera- 
tion of cherished ideas of the inspiration of 
Scripture, — a truth so inwoven with the 
thoughts of religion in the mind of the aver- 
age man that he is thrown into confusion 
whenever it seems to be questioned, and is 
ready to lapse into whatever gulf of doubt is 
best suited to his disposition. In any case, he 
becomes doubtful of the Church, and grows 
languid in his faith, or takes up some mild 
form of charity to fill its place in his con- 
science. The Church denounces or pities him, 
or makes some halfway concessions to the new 
thought and interpretation intended to break 
the force of their meaning; but instead it 
only awakens his resentment, for he has 
learned that evolution is no more partial than 
gravitation, and that the higher criticism 
deals simply with facts. 

The Rev. Mr. Campbell of London, recently 
speaking at Northfield, was asked from the 
audience, " how he got along with truth and 
evolution." He replied, " Truth and evolu- 
tion ? Evolution is truth." The question and 
answer indicate the relative positions of the 
churches in this country and in Great Britain. 



18 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

They are a generation in advance of us in 
their management of most theological ques- 
tions. The contrast is due to the fact that 
preaching which involves evolution, eschato- 
logy, and biblical interpretation no longer dis- 
turbs the people ; these subjects are not tech- 
nically preached but implied in the sermons, 
while here it is felt that the pulpit keeps 
something back. This is both true and not 
true. Few preachers in New England decry 
evolution and the higher criticism, and many 
wisely consider them as not proper topics for 
the pulpit if treated as pure science. The 
trouble lies in the preacher's failure to come 
fully under these ruhng ideas, and of course 
the people doubt either his sincerity or his 
ability to grasp them. The old saying, " like 
people, like priest," is now only half true. 
When people and priest do not sympathize 
they part company. The preacher must con- 
quer the people if he would keep them ; but 
he must be converted through and through to 
what he believes. When he fully submits him- 
self to modern thought, and follows where it 
leads, he finds himself at the very heart of the 
revelations of God in nature and in Scripture. 
Such preachers are heard without disturbing 



THE CHURCH 19 

the faith of simple beHevers or repelling those 
who think in the modern way. The pulpit 
has no more immediate task before it than to 
break into this open secret of effective preach- 
ing, — that is, preaching which the intelligent 
as well as the simple will hear gladly. The 
difficulty is great because of the different 
points of development at which the churches 
stand. The point of approach is, of couise, 
or should be, the Theological Seminaries ; but 
their relation to the churches and the tenure 
of their existence are such that while modern 
thought in science and exegesis is quietly ac- 
cepted and even taught in nearly all, it is not 
pushed to its full meaning and real conclu- 
sions as to doctrine. Hence they fail to lodge 
in the students that commanding belief that 
should inspire and color their life and words. 
Young men go to the churches with esoteric 
notions instead of burning convictions, not 
wholly sorry to escape the reproach of being 
infected with " new ideas." Probably no more 
delusive word ever crept into popular nomen- 
clature in theology than that of " the good old 
Gospel." Those who most use it to-day hold 
a theology that was once scouted as new, 
while those who are striving to bring it into 



20 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

accord with the words and spirit and ruHng 
ideas of the Christ are denounced as brinsfers 
in of a new Gospel. 

The Theological Seminary — as a part of 
the University — is the determining factor of 
the theological belief of the churches ; it ex- 
ists chiefly for that end. It is not a gymna- 
sium for teaching a certain amount of easily 
attained knowledge and a drill in sermonic 
composition. Instead, its function is to teach 
students to see and feel the full force of a few 
eternal laws that govern the world and uphold 
society, and through them lead men to realize 
and achieve their destiny as the children of 
God. The Theological Seminary finds no data 
for a scientific, not to say practical, theism — 
the question of questions — until it searches 
it out and teaches it from evolution. Thus it 
finds ground for the truth that man has al- 
ways sought for, and in higher moments as- 
serted — the divine immanence in all things, 
and the Hke nature of God and man. If there 
is to be a theology in the future, it will be 
found in this region, in connection with the 
University which is to play a large part in its 
reconstruction ; that is, theology will spring 
from the whole circle of human knowledge. 



THE CHURCH 21 

Only in this way can it bring the divine and 
the human into conscious relationship. To cut 
out of ancient creeds intolerable parts, leav- 
ing a mangled remainder to live on, is a weak 
expedient which, if persisted in, results in a 
degenerate church and ministry ; for strong 
men shrink from feeble measures. If it is 
true that the pulpit is degenerating, it is in 
no small degree due to the fact that clear-eyed 
candidates will not put new wine into old 
bottles, and are equally unwilling to enter a 
ministry where there are neither wine nor bot- 
tles. 

A brief chapter in the history of the Church 
on this matter is not to be expected, for the 
reason that the mass of the people must be 
brought up to the point where they will listen 
to the University. The ancient and the later 
churches there took shape and gained their 
permanent form. As they drop their outworn 
cast they must go again to the University for 
renewal. Stated otherwise, the man of to-day 
will turn to the highest and widest sources for 
the grounds of his belief. A universal religion 
must have as broad a basis. But slow as the 
change will be, the first fruits of such study 
are already a marked feature of the Church. 



22 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

They are to be found more and more in those 
pulpits trained to drop the phraseology and 
atmosphere of the University, but wise enough 
to keep its method of thought. They preserve 
a just balance between the opportunism that 
is so clamorous yet often so useful, and the 
idealism in which is hid the real meaning and 
power of religion. They have the confidence 
bred by wide studies in many fields ; the hu- 
mility taught by the fact that no studies can 
compass the whole of any truth ; the earnest- 
ness and cheer that spring from the sense of 
having found their way out of a theology 
of negation and blind authority into a world 
where all knowledge utters one voice, and all 
life has but one law and one end. The enthu- 
siasm of these preachers does not cry in the 
street nor fly to retreats. They may go to 
Northfield, or they may stay away. It chooses 
its own method, but wherever it leads, there is 
a man whose life is fed from within his own 
soul, who believes that to bring man into the 
consciousness of God is his supreme duty — 
felt with such passion as only a clear-seeing 
soul feels before unquestioned and eternal 
truth. 

A man thus trained is quick to realize the 



THE CHURCH 23 

confusion into which the churches have come 
in regard to creeds. He will sympathize with 
Mr. Brierley's view as stated in the London 
" Christian World " (of July 2, 1903), who sup- 
plements his own insight with quotations from 
great names, which we give at length : — 

" There is to-day a feeling, not only amongst 
doubters, but in the most reHgious minds, a 
feeling so widespread that it may almost be 
called universal, that the creeds which in the 
orthodox liistoric churches stand for Chris- 
tianity are, in their present form, the survival 
of a thought-world which has been outgrown, 
and that they are consequently a hindrance to 
faith rather than its bulwark. 

" The feehng crops up in the most unex- 
pected places. Here, for instance, is Westcott, 
who, speaking of the Thirty-Nine Articles, 
says : ^ It is that I object to them altogether, 
and not to any particular doctrines. I have 
at times fancied it was presumption in us to 
attempt to define and determine what Scrip- 
ture has not defined. . . . The whole tenor of 
Scripture seems to me opposed to all dogma- 
tism and full of all application.' From another 
side John Wesley, after one of the fullest ex- 
periences ever given to mortal of the action of 



24 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

religion in human life, declares in his old age : 
* I am sick of opinions. I am weary to bear 
them ; my soul loathes the frothy food. Give 
me solid, substantial religion ; give me a hum- 
ble, gentle lover of God and man, a man full 
of mercy and good faith, a man laying him- 
self out in the work of faith ; the patience of 
hope, the labor of love. Let my soul be with 
those Christians wheresoever they be and 
whatsoever opinions they are of.' 

" The citation may be fittingly closed with 
these remarkable words from John Henry 
Newman : * Freedom from symbols and arti- 
cles is abstractedly the highest state of the 
Christian communion and the peculiar privi- 
lege of the primitive Church. . . . Techni- 
cality and formalism are in their degree inevi- 
table results of public confessions of faith. . . . 
When confessions do not exist, the mysteries 
of Divine truth, instead of being exposed to 
the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are 
kept hidden in the bosom of the Church far 
more fruitfully than is otherwise possible.' 

" These witnesses had all signed creeds ; 
they belonged to churches which bristled with 
dogmatic propositions. Yet what is evident is 
that at the back of their minds lay a conscious- 



THE CHURCH 25 

ness, not formulated, and therefore all the 
more powerful, that the strength and vitality 
of the Church lay quite otherwhere than in 
its tables of doctrine. And as we look through 
the history of the Christian centuries we find 
everywhere confirmation of this truth. The 
creeds arose out of the speculative, not the 
religious spirit. The ^ heretics ' speculated 
first, and the Church met them with counter 
speculations of its own. To wade through the 
literature of those early centuries, the litera- 
ture which Hes back of the creeds, is a disci- 
pline of incredible tediousness, but it helps 
one greatly to an estimate of the value of 
these products." 

Mr. Brierley goes on to say : — 

" This kind of inquiry wherever pursued 
gives the same results, and they are not favor- 
able. But while theology and the Church, in 
the matter before us, yield only a negative 
outcome, another experience, in a different 
field, has meantime been accumulating its 
treasures, and, at an opportune moment, is 
able to offer them for the elucidation of our 
problem. That half -expressed feeling of the 
unsatisfactoriness of the Church formulas, as 
either a ground or a statement of the faith, 



26 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

which we found in a Westcott, a Wesley, and 
a Newman is, when we turn in another direc- 
tion, suddenly illuminated, and shown as by a 
flash in its true logical relations, by the light 
which comes from another sphere. 

" While the Church has been busy with its 
propositions, another power has been quietly 
rising by its side, and influencing with an 
ever-increasing potency the sphere of human 
affairs. This power is science, in its applica- 
tion to the arts of life. We talk of creeds. 
What are the creeds of science and how does 
it express them ? When we have understood 
the bearings of that question, and of its an- 
swer, we shall possess, if not the solution of 
our theological problem, at least a substantial 
help towards it." 

The solution will not be complete, how- 
ever, unless by science is meant the whole en- 
cyclopaedic view of the world, especially as it 
embraces human experience. If we do not 
find the illustration and vindication of the 
Faith in the heart and life of humanity, we 
shall find them nowhere. If we can interpret 
the human heart as it feels and hopes and 
strives in the natural relations of life ; if we 
can measure the play of the human mind in 



THE CHURCH 27 

the family, in society, and in the nation, — we 
shall find both the field of the Gospel and the 
materials for a creed if we care for one. The 
thing to be done at present is not to crowd 
upon men a system conceived in some way to 
be true, nor to bind them down to a hard, 
literal, undiscerning reception of texts, but to 
set forth the identity of the Faith with the 
action of man's nature in the natural relations 
of life ; to show that the truth of God is also 
the truth of man. Truth is not actually truth 
until it gets past dogma, and beyond author- 
ity for an external revelation, and awakens an 
intelligent and responsive consciousness of its 
reality; it does not actually reach the man 
until then, and all previous action is unreal 
or merely disciplinary, useful indeed, but 
partial and without spiritual power. 

Here lies the vocation of the preacher to- 
day, yet his appeal to life must not consist in 
vague generahzation and moralizing, nor in 
psychic analysis, unless the subject itself is 
weighty and lies close to the duty or the ques- 
tion of the hour. It is a very strenuous order 
of preaching demanded in this transition from 
the old to the new, and it is often met by 
giving up great themes half true for trivial 



28 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

ones wholly true, — a dash of poetry, an in- 
definite ethic, a fastidious culture, a string of 
anecdotes that hide the truth they would make 
plain, an avoidance of phrases that have been 
the watchwords of all holy living and high 
achievement since the world began, often 
without a church, or ritual, or discipline that 
goes to the bottom of character, — all seem- 
ing to show with how little religion we can 
get on, or how slight a thing it is when we 
have it ; — better a century more of decadent 
Calvinism than such substitutes as these. 

The creed of life, if we may so term it, 
will be definite, searching, severe in its pen- 
alties and as relentless as they are in life it- 
self, urgent both on the restrictions and the 
possibihties of life, and never forgetful of 
those ulspirations that always come when the 
full meaning and import of life are revealed. 
Its sacrifice will be more real than that of a 
vicarious oblation, for it will be of self and on 
the cross of obedience to truth and duty. 
There will be no original sin to confuse the 
mind, but enough of one's own to be kept 
down and turned to moral uses. Its heaven 
will not be so clear and golden as that of old, 
but it will take on such color and form as 



THE CHURCH 29 

overcoming life may give it, and become as 
real and present as life itself. The confusion 
of to-day will not be ended by blowing it 
away into thin mist, nor by explosions of crit- 
icism, but only by clear vision now opened 
by real life in a real world. 

But the immediate question is not so much 
what the Church shall beHeve, as what it shall 
do. We find here the same confusion, which, 
however, is not wholly a bad sign. So long 
as the field of its faith lay in another world 
and its end was the salvation of the soul, its 
duties were few if great, and its thought sub- 
jective rather than social. All this is changing 
— slowly but in the right direction. With- 
out set purpose of its own, and without know- 
ing why, the churches are becoming aggres- 
sive in objective ways. There is thus coming 
about what has been called a " Priesthood of 
the People," who are returning to the primi- 
tive idea of reHgion, and are taking the work 
of the Church into their own hands, and — 
for the most part — are dealing with it in 
wise ways ; certainly in the way of their own 
humanity. By their own thoughts and through 
their own selves they are determining what 
the Church shall be. It is thus that humanity 



so ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

is fulfilling itself and bringing out the divine 
image. 

Remote as the cause may seem, this change 
is largely due to the democratic spirit that 
pervades the nation. A new conception of 
society and of human relations has led men 
to feel that their duties to others are equal if 
not paramount to those due to themselves. 
This impregnating idea is reinforced in no 
small degree by the pulpit, so far as it has 
come under the influence of modern thought 
and learned the real meaning of the New 
Testament. But the people have outrun the 
preacher and the church. Strong spiritual 
movements lay hold of the masses sooner 
than upon those who live and think among 
established theories. The Spirit is a wind and 
blows freest in the open. Consequently there 
are to-day movements going on in the churches 
of which they are only half aware or treat 
but slightingly. One must think twice before 
one speaks lightly of such lay bodies as the 
Young Men's Christian Association, the Chris- 
tian Union, the Christian Endeavor Society, 
the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, the Epworth 
League, the Baptist Union, the Student Vol- 
unteer Movement, the Brotherhood of Andrew 



THE CHURCH 31 

and Philip, the Girls' Friendly Society, the 
King's Daughters, and others of like nature. 
These societies stand for an idea and a move- 
ment. No matter how crude or trifling they 
may appear, nor what mistakes they make, 
they cannot make more or worse than the 
churches from which they spring yet do not 
desert. If they are too enthusiastic, and too 
gregarious, they are still unconscious protests 
against the frequent meagreness and dullness 
of the churches. With the instinct of young 
life, they look to life for a field of action. 
Their philosophy is all the truer because it is 
so unconscious. They organize and discipline 
themselves into service, and learn how to bring 
things to pass. They are persistent and cath- 
olic and free. They insist on work, and are 
eager for results. They demonstrate the value 
of the ecclesia and its naturalness, and so 
avoid the barrenness of extreme individualism. 
It is a part of the confusion and blindness in 
the Church-world that these movements have 
not been more closely examined and measured 
both pro and con. It might be expected that 
the churches would welcome such possible re- 
cruits in the desperate conflict that lies before 
them. They have undertaken to do the one 



32 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

safe and most necessary thing to be done in 
this world ; and that is to do good. Almost 
everything else is questioned, or soon will be. 
The only refuge of the churches is in plant- 
ing themselves on this eternal thing which 
cannot be shaken. If these simple and spon- 
taneous efforts to meet this prime duty shall 
prove failures because ill conceived or over- 
laden with the faults of youth, they will at 
least have shown the churches where they are, 
and what they are to do when they are routed 
out of their strongholds of dogma by the 
critics — as they are sure to be. To wait, de- 
pending on what may be left, is blindness ; 
to betake them to what the critics have made 
doubly clear, and the unperverted spirit of the 
young has unconsciously attempted, is the 
only salvation. 

But however it be, the churches should look 
well to their charities as a hiding-place against 
the coming storm. If men or churches are 
doing good, they can carry a heavy load of 
heresy or dead orthodoxy and still live. These 
charities consist in most churches of missions 
wherever they are needed, — next door or in 
the antipodes, education as the vehicle and 
prop of religion, deeds of humanity, and all 



THE CHURCH 33 

works for promoting personal and civic right- 
eousness. The conditions will shape the works. 
There is a spiritual thrift by which the Church 
lives, and to which it is as distinctly bound as 
the individual. 

And here we are brought to consider, by 
way of comparison, one of the most immedi- 
ate questions before us, that of the Roman 
Catholic Church. Professor Roswell Hitch- 
cock of Union Theological Seminary, not long 
before his death, said : " We should be very 
careful how we treat the Catholic Church : 
it has already been of great service to us and 
we shall need it ao^ain. It is defending^ the 
family, and is a stronghold of law and order." 
The need which he did not name has been 
met by its position on the labor question. 
President Carroll D. Wright has recently 
said : " I consider that the Encyclical of Leo 
XIII. on the labor question has given the 
foundation for the proper study of social sci- 
ence in this country. It is a vade mecum with 
me, and I know that it has had an immense 
influence in steadying the public mind." 

The Family ; Obedience to Law ; Labor : — 
these are the problems with which the nation 
and the churches are struggling, but no church 



34 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

is doing more to safeguard these vital interests 
than the Roman Catholic. The question how 
it happens to have this influence may go hy ; 
that it has it is sufficient at present. 

It would he idle to prophesy that the church 
which first set foot on the continent will stay 
longest. It is enough that it will stay and is 
already a power. It may retain a formal and 
harmless allegiance to the Pope, and thus even 
draw from him something of use, — like the 
last Encyclical of Leo XIII. ; but if the Pro- 
paganda should urge the temporal power, King 
John's answer to the Pope's Legate would be 
repeated here in no uncertain tones : " No 
Italian priest shall tithe or toll in our domin- 
ions." It would be worse than idle, it would 
be calamitous, to oppose the Catholic Church 
in the present juncture of our affairs. Pro- 
testantism has not only nothing to fear, but 
much to learn from it, as to organization, 
worship, and fundamental ethics. It contains 
what George Eliot called " the ardent and 
massive experience of man." It is enough 
that it is a Christian Church. Its theology is 
substantially Augustinian orthodoxy, which 
it shares with large Protestant bodies. Ec- 
clesiastically, it is at variance with Protestant- 



THE CHURCH 35 

ism, but that question will take care of itself. 
It is full of superstitions, most of them harm- 
less, while some hide a truth. It stands for 
sound ethics, for humanity, for learning, and 
also for science and progress and modern 
thought, but in a somewhat hampered sense, 
— encyclically denied, but practically recog- 
nized. 

It is specially needed so long as the growing 
majority of our immigration is Catholic and 
largely Latin. The country could not safely 
contain these hordes nor govern them without 
Catholic influence. Our hope is that they will 
be Americanized. We cannot in the future 
see a day when the Catholic Church will not be 
of measureless value to the nation ; nor can a 
day be foreseen when the nation wiU not be 
Protestant. In this sure diversity lies its safety 
and also its strength. What of wisdom and 
Christian faith twenty centuries have wrought 
out should not fail of use in this New World ; 
what is not of truth and wisdom may be left 
to its own self-eviction.^ 



1 " American Romanists do not, as a rule, care so very 
much about the Papal Supremacy. They submit to it, but 
they do not especially love it." — The Rev. William R. 
Huntington, D. D. 



3G ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

The churches of the country, regarded as a 
whole, have been from the first of mimediate 
and permanent vahie. Over and over again 
they have saved and are still saving the na- 
tion. To forget it is folly ; to undo it is 
disaster. All lovers of their country, and all 
who have skill in detecting the play of cause 
and ell'ect, are watching closely the course 
of things, to see if they are still fulfilling the 
high vocation to which they gave themselves 
at the beginning. There are those who take a 
closer view of the situation, and ask if religion 
itself is to die out of the hearts of the people. 
These questions do not spring from a pessi- 
mistic temper, but from the apprehensions of 
thoughtful minds as they watch certain ten- 
dencies that are steadily gaining ground. The 
most noticeable is the lessening hold of the 
Church upon the people at large. The indus- 
trial classes in great numbers are deserting it, 
with the result that those who still remain are 
forced into becoming a class, and are no longer 
the people ; and as the note of universality is 
growing less distinct, the pulpit is a waning 
influence. While the great preachers, like 
Beecher and Bushnell and Brooks, are rare, 
there never was a time when the average of 



THE CHURCH 37 

ability in the pulpit was so high as it is to-day. 
Nevertheless it is heard by lessening congre- 
gations, and certainly with diminished influ- 
ence. The industrial classes might be won 
back if the Church should brino; itself into 
profounder sympathy with the eternal laws of 
justice and humanity and equality that are its 
foundation. A plainer word and a far differ- 
ent administration are needed before Labor 
returns to the Church. 

Graver apprehension is felt on account of 
the note of question and uncertainty that per- 
vades the Church. Everything is doubted, or 
is vehemently defended because it is doubted. 
The result is perplexity and languid interest ; 
the ties are easily dissolved ; the great real- 
ities — or what have been regarded as such — 
fade out ; so much is gone, why not all ? It 
would be useless to call attention to these 
things if they were signs of fatal decay, or 
anything but signs of a temporary condi- 
tion due largely to confusion of thought in 
matters of faith. The Sunday newspaper, the 
secularization of Sunday, the absorption in 
business and social folly are effects, not causes. 
The Church will hold its own against such 
things when it has attained — not returned — 



38 ESSAYS KOll TIIK DAY 

to ilio Ijiiili that Jiw.'iits it. lUit tins is tho 
cnuMal j)()iii<. Vaui tho (Miurch ciuluro the 
slr.iiii <>r tli(^ tninHition from faith in what 
have been r(»<»ar(hMl as tho foundations of 
roli«;ion, to thos(i that lie h(vfor(^ it and Avill 
not h(i put aHi(h^? " Kaitli I'ollovv.s opinion," 
as Aristothi \o\\fr n^o said, hut it often foUows 
alar olV. Tlie Heiontili(^ liahit ol' thou<»ht is 
rccoo'nizod «j^(MUMalIy hnt not sj^'cilicallv. Ex- 
ception is iua(h» ol' rehj^ion wliere it laces the 
old (piestions of miracle, ins})iration, and (^s- 
ehatolof^y ; and as tluvse (puvstions are thou<;ht 
to turn on ihe inlallihiliiy of tlu^ Bible, the 
stream of criticism is now falhn*];; heavily upon 
its students, with correspondini^ confusion 
amonji^ tho people. If they eould be led — by 
thc! ])nlpit and the relii^ious ])ress — to accept 
Tillotson's debnition of infallibility as " the 
liighest perf<H'tion of the knowing!;; faculty,'' 
the greatest stumbling-block now in the way 
of the churches would be renurved. And if 
some such view of nnracde as that in IJush- 
nell's " Natures and tlu^ Supernatural " could 
once more bo made familiar, it Avould ^o far 
to silence tho alarms that are sounded by 
those who know neitlier IJushnell nor the 



THE CHURCH :W 

scientists of the day. The people could be 
quieted if the preachers would let it appear 
where the Church stands or may stand on 
these subjects, rather than raise questions 
which, while unanswered, are sapping their 
faith. 

That these and like apprehensions indicate 
a <^eneral breakinj^ up of the churches, oi' that 
they involve the whole world of religious 
thought, is not to be allowed. It is not the 
final result that is to be feared, but the long 
and weary tract of ignorance and timidity and 
mistaken faith and invested interests and blind 
conservatism that must be crossed before the 
inevitable result is gained. To let matters 
drift and suffer the churches to lapse into 
ethical clubs, or, by violent reaction, into 
peaceful retreats where neither thought nor 
doubt enter, is not the American way of 
handling difficult (piestions. Tli(;y will be set- 
tled when the churches suifcir themselves to lie 
led out of regions of thought and nuithods of 
action that lie behind them, and enter into the 
New World that time and knowlcMlge liave 
opened. The present confusion will not yield 
to minor remedies, but only to fuller know- 



40 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

ledge of the subjects in hand. This knowledge 
is slowly growing, but it is hindered by the 
very democracy that is the life-blood of every 
true American Church ; the ignorant masses 
hang on the skirts of those who would fight 
the battle that cannot be shunned. No rad- 
ical change of organization and especially no 
consolidation are now wanted ; they would 
simply increase and bring out the lingering 
majority that hinder those who are leading 
them out of their confusion and darkness into 
order and light. 

If we have seemed to speak only of the 
darker side of the Church, it is because we 
have touched its immediate questions. A more 
general view would put it in the same light 
as the nation, for the Church is both its re- 
presentative and, externally, its product. It 
reflects the nation, and shares its prevailing 
characteristics. For though the churches have 
largely made and shaped the nation, it is now 
exerting a return influence upon them. The 
Puritan gave the nation its political cast and 
temper of mind, but he did not impose upon 
it a religion. That was left to take care of it- 
self ; hence its one hundred and forty-seven 
churches ; — a calamity say some, while others 



THE CHURCH 41 

see in them the very result that was to be ex- 
pected when the field of religious thought was 
left wide open. The multiplicity of churches 
reveals several things of great importance ; — 
first, man's ineradicable instinct for religion. 
The choice was open, as it never before had 
been, and he chose religion as his supreme 
portion; second, it secured an almost universal 
spread of religion, for so it works when it is 
free ; third, it reveals an unconscious tendency 
on the part of the churches to coordinate 
themselves with the nation, — a process that 
will come out more and more as time goes on. 
It will embrace both what is bad and what is 
good. The result cannot be escaped and must 
therefore be accepted. But before deprecat- 
ing this fate it may be well to ask if the co- 
ordination will spring out of the fundamental 
and ruling ideas of the nation, or from the 
accidents and incidents of its passing history, 
— out of its nature, or the chance phases it 
displays. If the former, there will be as little 
need to despair of the Church as of the Re- 
public. Had there been at first one predom- 
inant Church, and had coordination between 
it and the nation been attempted even in the 
slightest degree, we might be repeating the 



42 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

conflict now going on in England between the 
established and the free churches/ 

Overmuch contempt has been poured upon 
this multiplicity of churches. It has given 
religion — perhaps not of the highest order, 
but such as was at hand — to a vast number 
of people to whom it was religion indeed, and 
whom it saved from barbarism, — a danger 
narrowly escaped. But the multiplicity, so far 
as it is excessive, will cure itself. Education, 
modern thought, and the tendency to part 
with a local and take on a general type of be- 
lief, will bring to an end the least worthy. 
The rest are offshoots or excisions from the 
greater churches, to which they will naturally 
return. They were not without some real jus- 
tification, though they may not have been 
wise, and were in almost every case the logical 
outcome of the prevalent doctrine of plenary 
inspiration of the Bible. With the incoming 

1 Principal TuUoch of St. Andrews said of Robertson, 
that " he knew very well, that, whatever words we may use, 
it is simply a fact — which no theory whatever can alter — that 
men will differ in religious opinion, and that the higher view, 
therefore, is to admit the validity of dogmatic differences, 
and to point to the true Centre, the Spirit of Christ, in which 
all differences, if they do not disappear, assume their true 
proportion." — Religious Thought in Britain during the Nine' 
teenth Century, p. 317. 



THE CHURCH 43 

of a truer theory, the way will be open for 
return without need of apology on either side. 

The question varies when we come to 
the greater and more thoroughly intrenched 
churches. In some of them the terms of 
membership are too severe, and the theology 
is too rigorous in its dogmatism to go along 
with the nation whose ruling idea breathes 
freedom and equahty. Hence men, especially, 
shrink from assuming membership, not from 
lack of religious feeling, but because of their 
unwillingness to separate themselves from the 
great body of the people ; — the moral of 
which is that the terms should be broader 
and more catholic. By necessity the early 
Church was a peculiar people — favored by 
the Hebrew idea of separateness ; also a ne- 
cessity so long as it stood out against a gross 
barbarism. But that day is passed. The es- 
sential idea of Christianity as the divine ex- 
pression of humanity leads men to fellowship, 
and a sensitive nature shrinks from the Church 
except as it stands for and with a common 
humanity rather than apart from it. 

The question varies somewhat when we 
come to the Liturgical Churches. This ele- 
ment was left behind when the Puritans came 



44 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

hither ; they might well have gone back for 
it, had the Established Church then been in a 
condition to give anything to anybody. In- 
stead, Wesley sent over Methodism, — a pos- 
session worth all liturgies. The Presbyterian 
Church has a full and rich liturgical service, 
but it is unused. The Episcopal Church pro- 
vides one for those who wish so to worship. 
By virtue of its liturgy and its doctrine per- 
taining to children it is winning a large place 
among the churches, and would win a larger 
were it not that — unnecessarily one would 
think — it is tied up by certain ecclesiastical 
notions and rubrics that violate democratic 
ideas, and run athwart the course if Church 
and Nation are to move on together. Were 
these restraints removed, it would open a path 
that many would delight to walk in ; but the 
paths in which Americans prefer to walk are 
those in which two can walk abreast within as 
well as without chancel bars. The nation for- 
bids nothing in ritual or belief, and welcomes 
variety so long as there is unity of the spirit, 
but it requires that all churches shall think 
in accord with its spirit and its institutions. 
This is inevitable. The nation cannot say one 
thing and the churches another. The domi- 



THE CHURCH 45 

nant spirit of the greater will silently find its 
way to the whole, and a free nation will cre- 
ate a free church by however many names it 
may be called. We do not say that the nation 
creates its religion, but only that it shapes 
and subdues it to its own complexion. 

For its interpretation and real meaning the 
Church must go to the University ; and never 
was the necessity greater than to-day. The 
Puritan in the wilderness never forgot the 
University in England. Harvard and Yale 
from the first have steadily aimed to develop 
it into encyclopaedic fullness, as the best means 
of getting at the truth in all important sub- 
jects. A college education is one thing ; a 
university is another. One is a drill ; the 
other is a court where reliable verdicts are 
looked for when all the evidence is in. It is 
there the Church must continually go to cor- 
rect ancient mistakes, to measure the urgency 
of new truths, to clear itself of entanglements 
when old and new conflict, to shut out the 
clamor of the mob howling for a new dogma 
or decrying an old one, to keep eye and ear 
open for fresh visions of God and new accents 
of the Holy Ghost, and above all for seeing 
to it that great matters are held in their due 



46 ESSAYS FOR THE DAT 

proportion, and that all matters worthy of 
attention are studied until they are brought 
into reasonable harmony with one another 
and so conduce to the one end of all study — 
truth. The University is thus the refuge of 
the churches for help in all those questions 
that perplex them. Such has been its fui^c- 
tion in all ages, and such it will continue to 
be ; for in the long run the man who knows 
most about a subject is the one who is at 
last heard. All this is qualified, however, by 
the question, whether the University is truly 
one, and so fit to treat important subjects in 
a universal way. The Church is finding its 
way out of the world of particular or special 
truths into that of universal truths. It is 
feeling after its own greatness and real mis- 
sion. It might aid Missionary Boards to de- 
cide whether they shall resign their charters, 
or still hold the Church to be the guardian and 
minister of a universal and absolute religion. 
If it is such, it must have a universal exposi- 
tion ; otherwise it goes with halting steps, — 
overweighted by its conscious greatness and 
betrayed by its apparent weakness. It is a part 
of the confusion of thougfht in the churches 
at present that there is a subtle doubt as to 



THE CHURCH 47 

whether or not Christianity is a local or a 
universal religion, — a question that involves 
its very nature. 

The increasing necessity of the Church is 
enlightenment, and for this we must look to 
the University. Nothing of value is being said 
to-day on theology or ecclesiastical usage or 
practical ethics that does not proceed from it 
or bear its stamp. But the University must be 
of the true Comenius type, — based on nature 
and crowned with faith in God, balancing all 
attainable knowledge, and thus able to teach 
harmonious truths and true living. 

More work lies before the churches than 
any so far achieved. All are on trial, how- 
ever permanent they may claim to be. Nearly 
all have grown out of Old World conditions, 
either by extreme repulsion or exact reproduc- 
tion. All wear a look of incompleteness, and 
easily fall into factions and schisms. There 
is a strange mingHng of strength and weak- 
ness, absurdity and sound reason, mediaeval 
gloom and modern light, bigotry and breadth, 
depths of triviality and summits of shining 
greatness, and — strangest of all — the most 
vital thing in the world, its free growth 
checked and thwarted. It would be a dismal 



48 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

outlook were it not that it can be regarded in 
the Ught of an evolution that has had as yet 
no final retrogression. What are deemed its 
faults and defects have their parallel in every 
phase of society. Were the Church faultless, it 
would be a wonder rather than an inspiration. 
It is still the moulder and the leader of the 
people, and hes at the bottom of nine tenths 
of the charity that relieves suffering and pro- 
motes virtue and fosters education. Above 
all, it refines manners and ratifies the laws by 
keeping alive a sense of eternal law. Chris- 
tianity is the religion of humanity ; it is that 
or nothing. Humanity will have its own, and 
at last it will have it in perfect accord with its 
perfected self. Man will no more fail to go 
on without striving for the highest expression 
of himself than he will stop in his evolution, 
— and that is not in his own power. There 
are behind and within him spiritual and moral 
forces that will as surely carry him on to the 
perfection of these forces as those which have 
brought him thus far were sure in their action. 
There are no slips in a divinely organized 
universe. Prophet and poet and the inde- 
structible sense of selfhood are not amiss on 
this point. 



THE CHURCH 49 

The Church is in its analytic stage of de- 
velopment, and awaits its synthetic period 
when its various elements of truth and power 
shall be brought into harmonious relations. 
It is now insisting on a few things, and an- 
tagonizing or ignoring many. But such is 
not the true church. It is a choir of chanting 
worshipers, it is a hospital, a school, a charity 
house, a company of preachers, of mission- 
aries, of students ; it is a university in which 
aU of God's works and ways and all human 
institutions are massed for universal ends. 
Toward some such goal is the Church moving 
under the divine energy lodged within it. 
Nothing is diviner in the Christ than the im- 
possibility to identify Him with any church, 
and yet He is in all ; at some point each 
touches Him, and because of that touch they 
are moving toward Him, — sloughing off 
some corruption, dropping some Worn-out 
superstition, expurgating their creeds of mis- 
taken exegesis, reinterpreting his words until 
they no longer flame with retribution in after- 
worlds, putting reason and spirit in place of 
literaHsm that defied them, — a process that 
is surely going on. It is not, however, a pro- 
cess of mere elimination. Denial is not pro- 



60 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

gress nor a way to freedom. True progress 
involves complexity, but it is made up of 
what is high and fine and beautiful and strong 
by reason of its pure unity. 

As to the final form of the Church, it would 
be idle to forecast it. That there will be one 
only, save in some high mystical sense, be- 
longs to the childhood of faith ; to contend for 
it now is to mistake its movement. Yet the 
Church is not a dream of our higher nature, 
nor a superstition of our lower nature. It is a 
vital thing, and stands not for a condition, 
but for a movement. Where it will lead, is not 
easy to determine. It is not moving in the pre- 
latical way, but it will have organization ; nor 
in the ritualistic way, but it will have a ritual 
that is not bound by rubric lines. It will not 
follow the path of Calvin or of Arrainius, but 
its freedom will not be unchartered. It will 
not accept Anselm's answer to his question, 
" Cur Deus Homo ? " but it will insist on the 
divine humanity, and find its goal somewhere 
in the region of this profound phrase, — at 
once mystical and historical and scientific, — 
a phrase that represents the whole play of our 
nature. And we would say with emphasis, 
that while the way will be traced along the 



THE CHURCH 61 

footsteps of great leaders of thought and 
through prophets and sacred books, no man 
nor church will be authoritative or other than 
a guiding and inspiring light. The power and 
the Hght that are always leading toward the 
unattainable goal are in man himself, in the 
development of his nature, — not as a mere 
creation of God, but as one in whom God is 
immanent, and is ever unfolding himself in 
human ways that are also divine. Hence, while 
it is to be expected that the word trinity will 
not be insisted on, and — as Calvin said — 
might better have not been used, the phrase 
Father, Son, and Spirit will pass into the lan- 
guage of the soul because it defines the forces 
by which man lives and fulfills his destiny. 
This phrase does not spring out of Nicene 
renderings, nor from any later or present 
forms of them, — all of which are more or less 
bewildering. Its roots go deeper down than 
the creeds — into man himself. When he has 
found himself he finds within him that which 
is in all nature, and he names himself a son of 
the Father of all ; he knows himself as spirit, 
and he cannot otherwise define himself than 
as one with Him who was filled with the 
Spirit, and so was the Son of the Father. And 



62 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

as for the Church, it has no office but to lead 
men to realize the divine humanity in them- 
selves. Thus, yet by no easy path, they find 
their way into the Eternal Reality out of 
which they spring. 



THE INTERPLAY OF CHRISTIANITY 
AND LITERATURE 



" The most romarkable pioco of writings on education is in a 
book of Gootho's. ... It is one of hia lust books ; writton when 
lio WHS an old man above seventy years of a{j;'o ; . . . full of meek 
wisdom, of iutelloot and piety ; wliich is found to be strangely 
illuminative, and very touching', by those who have eyes to discern 
and hearts to feel it. This about education is one of the pieces in 
Wilhclm Meister's Travels ... it has ever since dwelt in my 
mind as perhaps the most remarkable bit of writing which I have 
known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said 
that there are some ten pages of that, which if ambition hiid been 
my only rule, I would rather have written, been able to write, 
ihan have writton all the books that have appeared since I came 
into the world. Deep, deep is the meaning of what is said there, 
'i'hoso pages turn on the Christiiui religion, aiul the religious phe- 
nomena of the modern and the ancient world : altogether sketched 
out in the most aerial, graceful, delicately wise kind of way, so 
as to keep himself out of the common controversies of the street 
and of the forum, yet to indicate what was the result of things he 
had been long nuulitating upon. . . . lie practically distinguishes 
the kinds of religions that are, or have been, in the world ; and 
says that for men there are three reverences. . . . The first and 
8im])lest is tliat of reverence for what is above us. It is the soul 
of all the Pagan religions ; there is nothing better in the antique 
man than that. Then there is reverence for what is around us, — 
reverence for our ecpials, to Avhit^h he attributes an immense ])ower 
in the culture of man. The third is reverence for what is beneath 
UB ; to learn to recognize in i)ain, in sorrow and contradiction, 
even in those things, odious to Hesh and blood, what divine mean- 
ings are in them ; to learn that there lies in these also, and more 
than in any of the preceding, a priceless blessing. And he defines 
that as being the soul of the Christian religion, — the liighest of 
all religions; ' a height,' as (Joetho says (and that is very true, 
oven to the letter, as 1 consider), ' n height to which mankind was 
fated and enabled to attain ; and from which, having once at- 
tained it, they can never retrograde.' Man cannot quite lose that 
(Goethe thinks), or permanently descend below it again ; but al- 
ways, even in the most degraded, sunken, and unbelieving times, 
he calculates that there will be found some few souls who will 
recogni/,e wh.at ihis high(>Htof the religions meant." — CAKLYiiK. 

From " Inaugural Address at Edinburgh," Critical and Mis- 
cellaneous Essays, iv. p. 472. 



THE INTERPLAY OF CHRISTIANITY 
AND LITERATURE 

When Christianity appeared in the world it 
mij^ht have been regarded in two ways : as 
a force requiring embodiment, — something 
through which it could work ; or as a spirit 
seeking to inform everything with which it 
should come in contact. 

It was both, — a force and a spirit, the ob- 
jective and subjective of one energy whose 
end was to subdue all things to its own like- 
ness. It was inevitable that Christianity as a 
conquering energy should lay hold of the 
strong things in the world and use them for 
itself. It was inevitable, also, that as a spirit 
it should work spirit-like from within, secretly 
penetrating into all things open to it, trans- 
forming them by its mysterious alchemy into 
forces like itself, drawing under and within 
itself governments, art, learning, philosophy, 
science, literature, and whatever else enters 
into society as shaping and directing energy. 

Our theme is the interplay of Christianity 



66 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

and literature, or, more accurately, the way in 
which Christianity has infused itself into lit- 
erature, and used it for itself, making it a me- 
diiun by which it conveys itself to the world. 
We should not lose sight of the fact that 
Christianity had its roots in a full and varied 
literature, which was rich and profound in all 
departments except philosophy. The Jew was 
too primitive and simple-minded as a thinker 
to analyze his thought or his nature ; but in 
history, in ethics, in imaginative fiction, and in 
certain forms of poetry his literature well en- 
dures comparison with any that can be named. 
Its power and value have been greatly weak- 
ened by a dogma of inspiration, — a dogma 
unknown and unnecessary either to Judaism 
or to essential Christianity, antagonistic to the 
nature of faith, a limitation and a hindrance. 
Truth is absolute, and inspiration, though it 
were sevenfold itself, could not make truth 
truer than it is. No sympathetic reader will 
deny that the Hebrew scriptures are full of 
inspiration, but he resents putting that inspi- 
ration into a rule or form, and refuses to read 
them under a notion of authority that bars 
up the avenues to the mind, and turns every 
mental faculty into a nullity. Inspiration is 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 67 

its own witness and makes its own way. To 
formulate it into a dogma, and to lay that 
dogma as a requirement upon faith, is to 
smother the divineness of its breath. 

It is sometimes said that Christ left no 
book, and that he did not contemplate one ; 
and so men go searching around for the seat 
of authority, locating it now in an infallible 
Church, and now in Christian consciousness, 
and now in traditions and institutions ; and, 
not finding any or all of these sufficient, they 
turn on the bookless Christ, and, as it were in 
defiance of him, put together some biographi- 
cal sketches and sundry epistles, and formally 
declare them to be the divinely constituted 
seat of authority. 

The religious world is in the full tide of 
contention over this authoritative inspiration, 
— with book and bell, with courts and bans 
and such fagots as this later age permits, — 
fagots past burning, and only capable of send- 
ing up a smoke that wreathes itself into sar- 
donic forms, blinding the witnesses and pro- 
voking laughter in the spirits of the wise as 
they sit in the clouds and look down upon 
ancient tragedy turned to modern farce. 
Meanwhile the man of letters, the poet, the 



58 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

student of human nature, the religious soul 
reads the Bible and says : Why all this ado ? 
I read and believe and am satisfied ; these 
scriptures find me — in Coleridge's phrase — 
and because they find me I believe them to 
be true : how can the truth be made more 
than itself? 

Christ indeed left no book, but he was not 
therefore a bookless Christ. His revelation 
was not so absolute as to cut him off from 
the Hterature of the past as something upon 
which he stood, nor from that of the future 
as something which might embody him. It 
is often made an object of study to find Christ 
in the Old Testament ; it were a more profit- 
able study to find the Old Testament in Christ. 
His first discourse begins with a quotation 
from it, and he dies with its words upon his 
lips. It is not necessary and it would not be 
wholly true to say that the Hebrew scriptures 
gave shape and direction to Christ ; he was 
too unique, too original, too full of direct 
inspiration and vision to justify such an as- 
sertion, but he stood upon them not as an 
authoritative guide in religion, but as illustra- 
tive of truth, as valuable for their inspiring 
quahty, and as prophetic of more truth and 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 69 

fuller grace. His relation to them — using 
modern phrases — was literary and critical ; 
he emphasized ; he selected and passed over, 
taking what he liked and leaving what did not 
suit his purpose. They served to develop his 
consciousness as the Messiah, but they did not 
govern or determine that consciousness. We 
cannot think of Christ apart from this litera- 
ture. It is not more true to say that it was 
full of him than that he was full of it. 

Such being the case, we have a right to 
expect that Christ will go on investing him- 
self in hterature ; that Christianity will robe 
itself in great poems and masterpieces of com- 
position as varied at least as those of Juda- 
ism. Judea had but small culture and not 
much genius for it, but it was full of inspira- 
tion ; it had, in some way, caught sight of the 
face of God and seen his glory. Hence its 
Hterature, — without form or proportion, but 
having something better than art, — namely, 
reality in the highest field of thought, — 
passion for righteousness. It was impossi- 
ble that Christianity, which was itself inspi- 
ration and reality and righteousness, should 
not produce even a greater literature filled 
with these quahties and as wide and varied as 



60 ESSAYS Foil Til 10 DAY 

itself. As inspiration it donmnds expression, 
and the expression will take on the lornis of 
(he art It enconnters and nse It as Its medium. 
Hut, of itself, insj)iration ealls for the rhyth- 
mic How and measured cadence, even as the 
worlds are dlvnu^ly built nj»on harmony and 
move in orbits that '' still sin«;- to the youn«;- 
eyed cherubim." It was inevitable that a 
system so full of dlvliu> passion should call 
out a full stream of lyric poetry ; that a sys- 
tem involvinj;' the mysteries of the nnlverso 
and p^roat cosmic processes should clothe them 
in subtle dramas and majestic epics; that a 
system so profoundly lnvolvln«;* the nature of 
man should j)ro<luce [)hll()so[)hy ; that a reli- 
gion based on ethics shoulil evoke treatises 
on human society ; that a relio'ion so closely 
related to dally llf(> sliould call out the various 
forms of literaiure that discuss aiul de])ict 
life. The a[)p(\d which Christianity makes to 
mind, the discii)lino it puts upon all the fac- 
ulties, and, above all, the fact that it calls 
into harmonious and Intense action the whole 
nature, — intellect, heart, will, conscience, — 
all this becomes a very school for the j)ro- 
duction of poets and phlloso[)hers and artists. 
That is, (/hristianity is correlated to litera- 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATUKIO Gl 

ture, and calls for it as spirit calls for its 
proper form. 

Jt is not amiss to say that Christ liiiuself 
uttered nuicli that is in tiie truest sense litera- 
ture. It is not necessary to literature that it 
shall spring- from the literary motive. It do(!S 
not matter how it eounis a])out, if it is tlie 
genuine thing. Christ was witliout the liter- 
ary purpose, hut that does not forhid us from 
counting the para})le ol' tluj Lost Son as a 
consummate! and powtirl'ul piece of' literature. 
The great masterpieces do not S[)rlng pri- 
marily from the literary sense or pur[K)S(i, hut 
from human de[)th8 of feeling and duty. Tlie 
absence of the lit(M*ary motivii leaves the in- 
spiration freer. Enough of (Jhrist's words are 
recorded to admit of classifying him in respect 
to literature. He is to be put among the poets, 
— not the singers of rhymes nor the buihhjrs 
of epics, but those who see into the heart of 
things and feel the breath of the Spirit. It 
matters not in what form Clirist spoke, he 
was yet a poet. Every sentence will b(;ar the 
test. Put the microscope over them and see 
how perfect they are in stru(!ture. Lay your 
ear to them and hear how faultless is their 
note. Catch their spirit and feel how true 



62 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

they are to the inner meaniii«; of life, how full 
of God, how keyed to eternity and its eternal 
hymn of truth and love. 

The first literary products of Christianity 
in due form were the Epistles of St. Paul. 
It is diflicult at present so to separate them 
from the veneration in which they are held as 
to look at them in a free and critical way. A 
prevailinf^ doj^ma of inspiration shuts us out 
both from their meaning and their excellence 
as compositions. They are not treatises but 
letters, — one mind pouring- itself out to others 
in a most human way for high ends. What 
freedom ; the current flowing here and there 
as the mood SAvays the main purpose, now 
pressing steadily on between the banks, now 
overflowing them, going off and coming back, 
sometimes forgetting to return ; careless but 
always noble ; delicate but always firm and 
massive, imaginative but always natural ; ori- 
ginal, full of resource, giving off the overflow 
of his thought and still leaving the fountain 
full, often prosaic and homely, but as often 
eloquent and overwhelming in power ; a 
rough, hearty, and careless writer, but who 
ever wrote better, or to better purpose ? 

I pass by the Apocalypse, that marvel of 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 63 

sublimity and pathos and prophetic outlook 
and moral insight, — the sphinx of literature. 
Nor will I venture upon the Fourth Gospel, 
the latter part of which is so wholly the out- 
pouring of the divinest Soul in his divinest 
hours that criticism and literary estimate seem 
profane when applied to it. I can but name 
the Church Fathers, — Justin who ingrafted 
philosophy upon Christianity, and inaugurated 
the study of comparative religions ; Clement of 
Alexandria, — Plato come again in Christian 
robes, a man of this century as well as his 
own, a writer who touched the centre of Chris- 
tian theology in his doctrine of the Divine 
Immanence and of man as the divine image, 
too keen to be deceived by Adamic analogies 
and Jewish notions of expiation, a writer so 
rational and lofty in his thought that he can 
be classed in any of the higher orders of 
gpreatness ; Origen his pupil, — greater than his 
master, the first constructive theologian, the 
most brilliant of the Christian Platonists ; and 
Athanasius who stood up contra mundum 
and won in the conflict, fixing in the mind of 
the world a phrase of more worth than all 
literatures, — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 
Literature also may claim the Latin Fathers 



64 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

■who displaced the Greek conception of Chris- 
tianity and put in its place one of local origin 
which dominated the Church for more than a 
thousand years, but never won the conquest 
over it that the Greek Fathers had achieved 
through their greater openness to the ancient 
Greek authors, — the chief original fountain 
of thought and art. The Latin Fathers fell 
under the moulding influence of Rome, a 
people without an original and thoughtful 
literature, and keyed to power rather than to 
philosophy. The Greek Fathers made a full 
alHance with Greek literature, and drew into 
their writings whatever was most spiritual and 
rational and human in the ancients ; they 
baptized philosophy into Christianity ; but the 
Latin Fathers, however familiar they may 
have been with the Greeks, and however much 
use they made of their writings, turned their 
backs on the Eastern theology as weak and 
unfitted to sustain a Church, and found in 
the Roman Forum and State a theological 
framework of a sort and on a level with the 
world around it. The Greek was a thinker 
and so created a literature ; the Roman was 
an organizer and framed a social order. The 
Greek produced philosophies, the Roman sys- 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 65 

terns. The Greek thought freely, the Romaii 
within limits. These distinctions were mir- 
rored in their literatures and in the form which 
they gave to Christianity. That which cramped 
the literature of Rome produced the same 
effect on its Christianity, making it a rigorous 
order of administration instead of a system 
of thought such as it had been under Greek 
influence. Both may have been necessary or 
inevitable in the evolution of Christianity, but 
the Roman form was fatal to Hterature. It is 
on this account that so long as the Augus- 
tinian theology held sway over the minds of 
men, Hterature held itself aloof from theology, 
or rather theology failed to produce litera- 
ture. Hence there grew up a feeling that they 
are not good friends, — as Matthew Arnold 
indicates in his title " Literature and Dogma," 
— setting one over against the other. There 
is little affinity between them ; they belong to 
different guilds ; they speak in different dia- 
lects; they are not at home in each other's 
houses. The Latin theology was formal, arbi- 
trary, external, and worldly in its working 
though not in its terms, — qualities that htera- 
ture disdains. The poets, the men of genius, 
passed it by. Bereft of their humanizing in- 



66 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

fluence, it grew harsh and narrow and hard, 
even as it is now seen to be in some quarters, — 
changing in the direction of its weakness and 
fault, and losing what of original divineness 
was in it. 

What the result would have been if the 
Greek theology, with its friendly relations 
to Greek literature and philosophy, had not 
been supplanted by the Latin theology — de- 
void of a literary background, and antagoniz- 
ing the spirit of literature — cannot be told. 
Heresy might have overwhelmed the Church, 
and Christianity might have been refined into 
a beautiful mysticism or a forceless philoso- 
phy unfit to cope with the rough world. The 
hard, strong setting of a theology of power 
and externalism — exponent and product of 
the Roman State — may have been necessary 
to guard the jewel of faith till the world 
should become softer and wiser. Meanwhile, 
however, it must go without the aid of its 
strongest ally, literature. Hence for centuries 
they went their separate ways. The Church 
sang its hymns of faith, often most sweet and 
melodious ; the theologians and the schoolmen 
spun their systems, drawing upon all known 
sources of knowledge save the human heart. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 07 

all-wise concerning God and heedless of man, 
but no great spirit spoke aloud for human 
nature. 

I hasten to name the exception, — Dante, 
"the spokesman of ten silent centuries," as 
Carlyle called him, — the first if not the 
greatest name in Christian literature. 

The " Divina Commedia," regarded super- 
ficially, is mediaeval, but at bottom it is of all 
ages. It has for an apparent motive the order 
of the Roman Church, but by a law of inspi- 
ration — transcendence of purpose — Dante 
condemned as a poet what he would have 
built up as a son of the Church. He meant 
to be constructive; he was revolutionary. By 
portraying the ideal, he revealed the hopeless- 
ness of the actual Church. He was full of 
error, — political, ecclesiastical, theological, 
— all easily separable from the poet and the 
poem, but at bottom he was thoroughly true 
and profoundly Christian. The Church had 
filled its cup of perversion to the full ; theo- 
logy was full of magical and magisterial con- 
ceptions; society was buried under tyranny, 
and man had almost forgotten that he was 
free. Dante comes forward, and while hold- 
ing to the Church in his external purpose. 



68 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

breaks witli it wlion ho bo<»Ins to sing. Re- 
voislng Haluani, lio curstHl when ho uioant to 
bloss. 

Dante's inspiration consists largely in the 
absoluteness of his ethical and spiritual per- 
ceptions, and as such they are essentially 
Christian. Greek in his lornial treatment of 
penalty, he goes beyond the Greek, and is 
distinctly Christian in his conception of God 
and of sin. In the Pnrgatorio and Panuliso 
he enters a world unknown outside of Chris- 
tian thought. In tlie Greek tragedies mistake 
is equivalent to sin or crime, and led to the 
same doom, but the Inferno, with a few ex- 
ceptions made in the interest of the Church, 
contains only sinners. In the tragedies, de- 
feat is final oven though struggle must never 
end ; there is no freedom, no repentance and 
luuloing ; but Dante builds liis poem npon 
the living free will, the struggling and over- 
coming sonl. The mount of Pnrgatory rises 
high out of the sea and is not far off from 
Paradise. All speaks of will and moral choice 
and escape from evil and return to God. The 
entire play of thought is between sin and 
holiness, self and God, and the wlu)le atnu)s- 
phere is charged with freedom. It brought 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURK G9 

to judo-ment the fatalism of the East and of 
the older literatures, and was prophetic of the 
new spirit that was risin<j^ in the West and 
was boginninj^ to call for utterance. It tacitly 
rejected all doctrines of expiation by represent- 
in<^ salvation as a moral process. The hiohost 
in human life becomes the guide to the heaveidy 
life, and the pure passions of earth melt into 
the joys of Paradise. The scope of human 
nature is traced within moral lines, — from 
the frozen isolating hell of trciachery — daugh- 
ter of pride — to the white rose of Paradise, 
— purity enfolded by and dwelhng in beauty. 
Dante contrasts widely with Milton, wlio 
wrote under a lack and an incumbrance that 
the Italian did not know. Milton had no 
Beatrice, no passion of love which by its 
purity became knowledge itself, and so com- 
passed earth and heaven and all things. In 
other words, Milton's theology was based on 
power ; Dante's upon grace. Milton acce})ted 
his theology at the hands of Puritanism ; 
Dante drew his theology out of human life 
and his own heart. Stjirtino; thus with a for- 
mal and mechanical theology, Milton's great 
poem does not follow along the ways of the 
spirit and interpret humanity, but assumes 



70 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

an arbitrary form. In sublimity he surpasses 
Dante ; in naturalness he falls below him. By 
sheer dint of imagination he creates a world 
which so faithfully reflected the existing theo- 
logy that for generations all English reading 
people went at death to Milton's heaven or 
hell rather than to the rewards and dooms 
of the Church. 

Dante came both too early and too late to 
be caught in the meshes of dogmatism. The 
Church and not dogma, was in the ascendant. 
He partook instead of the new breath that 
was steaHng over the world, awakening mind, 
reviving art and architecture. He is to be 
classed with the Cathedral builders, — a pro- 
duct and mouthpiece of the same divine in- 
spiration. While they reared their arches and 
lifted their spires toward heaven he built his 
great verse. Cathedral and poem say the same 
thing ; both lose themselves in the ecstasy of 
God. 

Dante deserves our attention because 
through him Christianity first thoroughly in- 
trenched itself in literature, and also because 
the " Divina Commedia " is one of the master- 
pieces of human composition and the foremost 
product of Christian hterature. Schelling re- 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 71 

garded it as " the archetype of all Christian 
poetry." 

It need not be said at this stage of the 
study of Dante that the poem is not to be in- 
terpreted as an attempt to picture the next 
world. There is no time nor place in it. It is 
an allegory of human hfe, and the scene is in 
the soul of man. The gigantic imagery, the 
descending caverns of the Inferno, the pain- 
ful hiU of Purgatory, the rose of Paradise, 
— these mean nothing but moral facts and 
processes in the human heart put sub specie 
aeternitatis, under the form of eternity. " The 
threefold future world — I quote Mr. William 
T. Harris, to whom I am much indebted — 
" presents an exhaustive picture of man's re- 
lation to his deeds. Whatever man does, he 
does to himself; therefore the effects are found 
in himself." This is the sum and substance 
of Dante. Study him well and you will find 
this moral fact and process dehneated with the 
utmost accuracy. So, too, is it the substance 
of many of Christ's parables, which are to 
be read in the same way, — suh specie aeter- 
nitatis, — and not as prophetic pictures of 
future condition. The parable of Dives and 
Lazarus is purely Dantean in character, and is 



72 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

no more to be taken literally, or as including 
time and place, than is the Inferno, and — 
like it — is simply a graphic and startling 
picture of soul-conditions and processes. 

The Inferno depicts the "first immediate 
relation of an evil deed to the doer;" it will 
continue as long as the deed continues, but it 
may give way to purgatory. Dante does not 
intend to classify sinners by putting some into 
hell and some into purgatory ; the distinction 
stands for the stages of a process, or for dif- 
ferent phases of sin. The sinners are not in 
the Inferno forever, but their sin is there eter- 
nally and hopelessly, and art requires a seem- 
ing identification of the sinner with his sin. 

" Abandon hope all ye who enter here ; " 

that is the aspect and nature of sin. Sin is 
essentially hopeless ; it points downward to 
ever descending depths and to despair. Such 
is its nature, but the nature of a specific thing 
does not ovenide the greater nature which 
embraces God and his eternal love. 

The Purgatorio is the secondary effect of 
sin, — the inevitable punishment burning the 
sinner with purifying flames. 

In the Paradise there are good deeds which 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 73 

have no reaction in punishment and suffering, 
and yield full and immediate bliss. 

The " Divina Commedia/' so far as it deals 
with ethics, is thoroughly Christian and eon- 
tains well-nigh the sum of Christian morals. 
The atmosphere is that of freedom and ac- 
countability, and the keynote is hope that 
rests on love. God is no reflection of Koman 
power, but is 

" The Love which moves the sun and other stars." 

The doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity, 
of the Procession of the Spirit and its rela- 
tion to the Universe, are presented in a way 
that renders them consonant with modern 
thought and links them to the Universe as 
it is unfolding under newly discovered laws. 
They fulfill also the loftiest and dearest Chris- 
tian expectation. When Beatrice draws the 
poet into the very heart of the " Rose Eter- 
nal," her final words are : — 

" Behold how vast the circuit of our city ! 
Behold our seats so filled to overflowing, 
That here henceforward are few people wanting ; " 

the echo of an earHer vision : " I beheld, and, 
lo, a great multitude, which no man could 
number, of all nations, and kindreds, and 



74 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

people, and tongues, stood before the throne, 
and before the Lamb, clothed with white 
robes, and palms in their hands." 

The strong point in Dante is that he in- 
grafted into literature the purgatorial charac- 
ter of sin, — I do not say the dogma of Pur- 
gatory ; that went out with the flood of good 
and evil caused by the Reformation, and it 
was well enough that it should go, for both 
then and now it is a badly used doctrine, but 
it would be a mistake to lose the truth of it 
out of thought and life ; it would leave the 
moral world inexplicable. Whatever Protest- 
ant theology has done with this truth, Pro- 
testant Hterature has preserved it, and, next to 
love, made it the leading factor in its chief 
imaginative works. Sin and its reaction, pain 
eating away the sin, purity and wisdom 
through the suffering of sin, sin and its dis- 
closure through conscience, — what else do 
we find in the great masterpieces of fiction 
and poetry, not indeed with slavish uniform- 
ity, but as a dominant thought ? Hawthorne 
wrote of Httle else ; it gives eternal freshness 
to his pages. It runs like a golden thread 
through the works of George Eliot and makes 
them other than they seem. The root idea of 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 75 

this conception of sin is humanity, — the 
chief theme of modern Hterature as it is of 
Christianity j and is the one because it is the 
other. This conception pervades literature be- 
cause Christianity imparted it. 

In Dante it was settled that henceforth 
Christianity should have literature for a 
mouthpiece. As the Renaissance and the Re- 
formation prepared the field, — one bringing 
back learning and the other liberty, — Chris- 
tianity began to vest itself in literary forms. 
The relation has continued, and has gained in 
strength from century to century. The same 
process has been going on in each, — a grad- 
ual ehmination of Pagan ideas. The human- 
ity and freedom of Christianity have their 
parallel in Literature, until in both they have 
become dominant factors. It is unnecessary to 
say which has been the fountain head of the 
common stream, which the master-light in all 
the clear seeing that marks modern thought. 
For the most part the literature of the Occi- 
dent is Christian ; I mean the great literature; 
but we must not expect to find all of Chris- 
tianity in any one author. Working, spirit- 
like, its method has been that of searching 
out those gifted ones whose mental note re- 



76 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

sponded to some note in itself, and set them 
to singing or speaking in that key. Thus it 
has worked, and we must look for Christian- 
ity in Literature not as though listening to 
one singer after another, but rather to the 
whole choir. 

The range is wide and long. It reaches 
from Dante to Whittier ; from Shakespeare to 
Burns and Browning ; from Spenser to Long- 
fellow and Lowell ; from Cowper to Shelley 
and Wordsworth and Tennyson ; from Milton 
to Newman and Matthew Arnold ; from Bun- 
yan to Hawthorne and Tolstoi and Victor 
Hugo ; from Thomas a Kempis and Pascal 
to Kant and Lessing and Schleiermacher and 
Coleridge and Maurice and Kingsley and 
Bushnell; from Jeremy Taylor and South 
and Barrow and the Cambridge Platonists to 
Emerson and Amiel and Carlyle ; from Bacon 
to Martineau ; from Addison and Johnson to 
Goethe and Scott and Thackeray and Dick- 
ens and George Eliot. Pardon the long but 
still scant list. Some great names cannot be 
included. As paganism lives on in the State, 
so it survives in literature, but in each with 
waning force. Still, even under a strict con- 
ception of Christianity, but few must be ex- 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 77 

eluded. Nearly all strike some Christian note. 
It is not always clear ; often it fails to harmo- 
nize with much else in the author, and some- 
times it is lost for a while, or is drowned in the 
discords of this world ; but Christianity is a 
wide thing, and nothing that is human is alien 
to it ; nor is it possible that any product of a 
single mind can more than hint at that which 
comprises the whole order and movement of 
the world. Christ is more than a Judean slain 
on Calvary; Christ is humanity as it is evolv- 
ing under the power and grace of God, and 
any book touched by the inspiration of this 
fact belongs to Christian literature. Take, for 
example, the Plays of Shakespeare ; there is 
hardly anything in them that is obviously 
Christian, — a few over-quoted references to 
Christ, no abuse of the Church, a decent Eng- 
lish-like reverence, but no sense of Christian- 
ity either as a cause to be championed or as 
a prime factor in human life. Still they are 
Christian because they are so thoroughly on 
the side of humanity. How full of freedom ; 
what a sense of man as a responsible agent ; 
what conscience and truth and honor ; what 
charity and mercy and justice; what rever- 
ence for man, and how well clothed is he in the 



78 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

human virtues ; what a strong, hopeful spirit 
despite the agnostic note heard now and then, 
but amply redeemed and counteracted by the 
general tenor. If the predominant motive of 
Shakespeare were sought in his own lines it 
would be the couplet in Henry Fifth : — 

" There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out ; " — 

a sentiment one with the Christian estimate 
of this world and indicative of its process. 

Something of the same sort might be said 
of Goethe. It would be a misfortune, indeed, 
if he could not be regarded as an interpreter 
of Christianity, — not because the Divine 
Order needs the help of such a name, but be- 
cause it would seem as though Providence had 
defeated itself in so richly endowing a human 
mind and then suffering it to appear on the 
wrong side. When God opens the eyes of a 
man very wide, it is to be expected that he 
will not be blind to what is greatest. It is not 
a haphazard universe; mind is correlated to 
fact ; great minds do not fail to take account 
of great realities. 

Goethe is to be regarded as one in whom 
Christianity won a victory. Starting in a stout 
revolt against it, he ends in acquiescence. " It 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 79 

is altogether strange to me," he wrote to 
Jacobi, " that I, an old heathen, should see 
the cross planted in my own ground, and 
hear Christ's blood and wounds practically 
preached without its offending me. We owe 
this to the higher point of view to which phi- 
losophy has raised us." As the years went on 
he wove more and more of this Christian phi- 
losophy into his pages, and if his doctrine of 
renunciation was not a total unclasping of the 
hand in its grasp upon the world, so that he 
never fully mastered the secret of the cross, 
he reached the threshold of the great truth 
and stood facing the altar. 

But if his faith failed to reach the measure 
of his greatness, he rendered Christianity a 
weighty service by checking two harmful in- 
fluences which, however corrective and within 
limits useful, were pressing unduly upon the 
Faith and even threatening its existence, — 
the infidelity of Voltaire and the naturalism 
of Rousseau. Both rendered a necessary ser- 
vice, — Voltaire in ending the reign of super- 
stition, — as Carlyle has so well shown, — and 
Rousseau in breaking up an artificiality of 
thought and life that had nearly expunged na- 
ture. But each ran to the wildest extremes, — 



80 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

one bringing up in blasphemy, and the other 
in the impulses of primitive nature and endless 
contradiction. In going back to nature Rous- 
seau reversed evolution, which was a funda- 
mental thought with Goethe before it had 
gained the attention of science. Goethe set 
his hard German sense and loftier inspiration 
against these influences, insisting on reverence, 
and asserting a doctrine of nature that em- 
braced will and spirit, and made them the 
sources of conduct. 

Goethe also rendered Christianity an ines- 
timable service in destroying the mediaeval con- 
ception of the world as a piece of mechanism, 
and of God as an ** external world-architect," 
— conceptions that had come in through the 
Latin Theology, or rather had been fostered 
by it. Both Augustine and Calvin held the 
Divine Immanence, but it did not shut out a 
practical externalism in their systems. It may 
be truly said of Goethe that he introduced the 
modern spirit into theology, — chiefly, how- 
ever, through protests and denials : — 

" No ! such a God my worship may not win 
Who lets the world about his finger spin 
A thing extern : my God must rule within, 
And whom I own for Father, God, Creator, 
Hold nature in Himself, Himself in nature ; 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 81 

And in his kindly arms embraced, the whole 
Doth live and move by his pervading soul." 

In the transfer of thought from the con- 
ception of God as a purely transcendent 
maker and ruler of the universe to such a 
conception as that contained in these lines, — 
a God also immanent and acting from within, 
— we have the starting-point of the theology 
which is now prevailing, and prevailing be- 
cause it accords with other knowledge. As 
soon as theology is made a science, it must 
accord with other sciences, but whether a 
science or not, it must not contradict know- 
ledge, nor aHenate itself from the common 
thought of the world. The accepted discov- 
eries of science in respect to the universe re- 
quired a new conception of God, and it was 
Goethe's prophetic soul that led the way in 
this change, not, however, without the prompt- 
ings of such a philosopher as Spinoza and his 
own intuitive perception of the laws of the 
natural world. 

I have dwelt long upon Goethe, not be- 
cause he is an interpreter of Christianity in 
literature, but because he illustrates the rela- 
tion to Christianity of certain authors who 
are usually counted as doubtful, or as on the 



82 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

wrong side of Faith. The Christian value of 
an author is not to be determined by the full- 
ness of his Christian assertion. There is, 
of course, innnense value in the positive, fuU- 
statiu*ed believers like Dante and Bacon and 
Milton and Browning. Such men form the 
court from which there is no appeal. But 
Christianity is all the while in need of two 
thing's : correction of its mistakes and per- 
versions, and development in the direction 
of its universality. None can do these two 
things so well as those who are partially out- 
siders. An earnest skeptic is often the best 
man to find the obscured path of faith. Those 
who always lie " in Abraham's bosom " do 
not readily catch the tone of the eternal 
waters as they break on the shores of time. 
For many who doubt, there is no better au- 
thor than Amiel, because he was himself a 
doubter who was always struggling after the 
truth, and such an one is often nearer than 
those who never probe it with questions. 

" There lives more fiiitli in honest doubt, 
Bolievo me, than in half the creeds." 

But if a doubter is often a good teacher 
and critic of Christianity, much more is it 
true that it is often developed and carried 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 83 

along its proper lines not more by those who 
arc within than by those who stand on the 
boundary and cover both sides. Milton, 
though a great teacher of Christian ethics 
in his prose writings, did nothing to enlarge 
the domain of Christian belief or to better 
theological thinking in an age when it sadly 
needed improvement, but Goethe taught 
Christianity to think scientifically, and pre- 
pared the way for it to include modern 
science. So of Shelley and Matthew Arnold 
and Emerson and the group of Germans re- 
presented by Lessing and Herder, — authors 
who, with their Hellenistic tendencies, repre- 
sent a phase of thought and life which un- 
doubtedly is to be brought within the unfold- 
ing scope of Christianity ; and no one can do 
it so well as these modern Greeks. As kings 
of the earth they bring the glory and honor 
of their beauty and humanity and truth into 
the New Jerusalem which is always coming 
down from God out of heaven. In order to 
translate the natural into the divine, and to 
find a place for the divine in the natural, 
they who know the natural, and hold it even 
at some cost to the divine, must be em- 
ployed. 



84 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

No one better illustrates this point than 
Matthew Arnold. He has not a very lovely 
look with his Bishop-baiting and rough hand- 
ling of Dissent, but, with all this, there is 
something worthier and broader in the man. 
Like others of his class, he calls attention to 
overborne or undeveloped truth. There is no 
doubt but the Church has relied too exclu- 
sively upon the miracles ; Arnold reminds it 
that the substance of Christianity does not 
consist of them. It had come to worship the 
Bible as a fetich, and to fill it with all sorts 
of magical meanings and forced dogmas, — 
the false and nearly fatal fruit of the Refor- 
mation ; — Arnold dealt the superstition a 
heavy blow that undoubtedly strained the 
faith of many, but it is with such violence 
that the kingdom of heaven is brought in. 
When God lets loose a thinker in the world 
there is always a good deal of destruction. 
Such teachers must be watched while they 
are listened to. We ourselves must be critics 
when we read a critic. He has a hard, unbe- 
lieving, and even unimaginative side, — use- 
ful in view of what he had to do, but he has 
another side that is tender and believing which 
carried his full inspiration. We picture him 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 85 

as one who stood on the threshold of the 
temple looking to the altar, and even casting 
himself before it, — as in the lines on Rugby 
Chapel, — and interpreting the very law of 
the altar in " The Good Shepherd with the 
Kid;" — thus he stands upon the threshold 
looking within and believing, looking also 
without upon a world he could not under- 
stand. 

In tracing our subject historically it is in- 
teresting to note a certain progress or order 
of development, especially in the poets, in 
the treatment of Christianity at the hands 
of Literature. 

In Chaucer and Shakespeare we have a 
broad, ethical conception of it, free both 
from dogma and ecclesiasticism. The former 
mildly rebuked the evils and follies of the 
Church, but stood for the plain and simple 
virtues, and gave a picture of a parish minis- 
ter which no modern conception has super- 
seded. The latter denied nothing, asserted 
nothing concerning either Church or dogma, 
— keeping in the higher region of life, but 
it was life permeated with the humanity and 
freedom of Christianity. Spenser put its 
fundamental truths into allegories as subtle 



86 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

as they are beautiful, but too fine and ethereal 
to lay hold of " this rough world." Milton 
more than half defeated his magnificent 
genius by weighting it with a mechanical 
theology. It is audacious work to question 
the moral value of " Paradise Lost." Such a 
masterpiece of literary art can hardly have 
been wrought in vain, and doubtless it has 
been the source and cause of much reverence 
and spiritual earnestness. Its very aim as an 
" Epic of Redemption " is not without effect, 
however poor the argument, but it did much 
to rivet the chains of a mechanical theology, 
and it made heaven and hell so material that 
the picture of them became literal fact and 
expectation to all who spoke English despite 
the assertion that " myself am hell." The 
greatest tribute to the genius of Milton is the 
fact that he supplanted the Bible in the minds 
of those who adored it. The Puritan for two 
hundred years died in the faith and expectii- 
tion of Milton's heaven. It is in his prose 
writings that we find those ethical conceptions 
of Christianity Avhlch informed Puritanism 
and clothed its rugged strength with glory. 
Milton represents the force of the Puritan 
movement ; it swept him off his feet, — a 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITEIIATUIIE 87 

thinj^ that seldom liappens to a poet. It cap- 
tured him not only as a statesman, but as a 
poet, and so he sang its tlie()lo<j;'y in verse 
unapproachably sublime, but without corre- 
sponding^ s})iritual reality. In him is seen 
the anomaly of a great poet — and there is 
hardly a greater — who is without freedom, 
and yet worshiped freedom. 

The later poets seldom make the same mis- 
take ; they rarely forego their birthright of 
spiritual vision. Cowper verged in the same 
direction, but saved himself by the humanity 
he wove into his verse, — a clear and almost 
new note in the world's music. But the poets 
who followed him, closing up the last of the 
eighteenth century and covering ilie first of 
the next, served Christianity chiefly by pro- 
testing against the theology in which it was 
ensnared. The service rendercid to the Faith 
by such poets as Burns and Byron and 
Shelley is very great. It is no longer in order 
to apologize for lines which all wish had not 
been written. It were more in order to re- 
quire apology from the theology that called 
out the satire of Burns, and from the eccle- 
siasticism that provoked the young Shelley 
even to atheism ; the poet was not the real 



88 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

atheist. Wo now see, that whether con- 
sciously or not, they were making necessary 
protests, l)reakin<^ chains, opening- patlis, and 
clearinj^ the way for a rational and humane 
faith, — Burns with sad, boisterous mirth, 
Byron with stormy rage and defiance, Shelley 
by turning all nature into a witness to the 
living spirit of Truth and Love, foolishly 
throwing away the form of Christianity, but 
casting himself with martyi'-like devotion upon 
its spirit. 

The alliance between Christianity and Lit- 
erature which began soon after the Reforma- 
tion has since flowed chiefly along Protestant 
lines. Literature has not much to say for the 
Faith when it shuts itself up in an ecclesias- 
tical order ; it hardly rises higher than a Keble 
or a Faber. The poets will not sing except in 
subdued notes under rubrics and infallible 
edicts, and few will trouble themselves to write 
books on any subject that must submit to the 
" Lidex Expurgatorius." Hence most of the 
poetry pertaining to the Roman Church is 
either sentimental or rhapsodical ; none of it 
has epic greatness or the seer-like (piallty ; and 
while the English }>oets have mostly been, like 
Wordsworth and Tennyson, children of the 



CHRISTIANITY AND UTERATUKK 89 

Establinlied Church, their poeiu.s Jiro devoid oi' 
all Prelacy and even ol' j)relatical reference. 
The Christian epics, the j^reat reflective poinnH, 
and even tlie hest hymns an; the ])r()du('ts of 
Protestantism, but in its lar<»est and freest 
form. 

It is noticeable that wlnsnever any Christian 
lit(U"itnn! appears in non-l*r()t(\stant (rountries 
it is ^(uierally reactionary and ovc^nh-awn, or 
■weakly uncpiestionin^ in its conformity to the 
Church ; it is not critical, nor broad, nor free. 
IMie contrast reaches to (lurrent literature. 
Scarcely any "■ books that are books " a])pear 
in En<»lish tyj)e but they are either heavily 
char<i^ed with Christian humanity and senti- 
ment, or thciy debate sonu; ])robl(un of faith or 
some (juestion of morals. The novc;! of society 
and of naked realism, and the art-for-art's sake 
literature which lin<>erin<if heathenism now and 
then strives to revive, have no deej) and last- 
m*i; rejj^ard ; but (ivcM-y author who seems to 
win a ])la,ce and to k(H'p it relle(!ts how thor- 
ou<»hly Christianity and Literature interpene- 
trate each other. The ])crman(uit and classic 
seem to be that which is Christian ; and that 
which ignores Christianity and has escaped or 
missed its spirit, taking no pains even to ques- 



90 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

tion or to deny, fails of that hearing which 
impHes acceptance. 

The time seems nearly to have come in 
which a Christian nation will accept and adopt 
as classic only the literature which is Chris- 
tian. This is simply logical ; it must embody 
those truths and facts which it has adopted 
as the grounds of its life and conduct. Its 
literature must represent what it believes in, 
what it cares for, and it must enshrine the 
hopes which inspire its daily life, and, above 
all, its literature must feed the ideals which it 
has caught from its Faith. 

If, as was said at the outset, Christianity is 
a spirit that seeks to inform everything with 
which it comes in contact, the process has had 
clear and growing illustration in the poets of 
the last century. In one way or another — 
some in negative but more in positive ways — 
they have striven to enthrone love in man and 
for man as the supreme law, and they have 
found this law in God who works in righteous- 
ness for its fulfillment. The roll might be 
called from Wordsworth and Coleridge down 
to Longfellow, and but few would need to be 
counted out. Poetry, so far as it touches re- 
ligion, is no longer sentimental, or demiurgic 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 91 

as in Milton, but is speculative and philoso- 
phical. It grapples with the religious j)r()blenis 
of the age, and debates them as do the theo- 
logians and social philosophers. 

The marked examples are Tennyson and 
Browning, and of the two Tennyson is the 
clearer. Speaking roughly, and taking his 
work as a whole, it is more thoroughly in- 
formed with Christianity than that of any other 
master in literature. We do not, of course, 
refer to the ^ew/jer of Christianity; that is 
better expressed elsewhere ; nor do we mean 
that there are not authors who present some 
single phase of it in a clearer light. We do 
not forget the overwhelming positiveness of 
Browning, whose faith is the very evidence of 
things unseen, and whose hope is like a con- 
tagion. His logic is that of Job, — simple trust 
in a God who sustains an orderly universe : — 

" The year 's at the spring 
And day 's at the dawn ; 
Morning 's at seven ; 
The hillside 's dcw-pearlod ; 
The lark 's on the wing ; 
The snail 's on the thorn: 
God *8 in his heaven — 
All 's right with the world I " 

One would sooner spare almost any of 



92 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

Tennyson's lines than these rough ones from 
Browning : — 

" ]\Iy own hope is a sun will pierce 
The thickest dond earth over stretched ; 

That after Last returns the First, 
Though a wide compass round be fetched; 

That what boj^an best, can't end worst, 
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst." 

It is this very positiveness that removes him 
a httle way from us ; it is high and we can- 
not quite attain to it. Tennyson, on the con- 
trary, speaks on the level of our finite hearts, 
believes and doubts witli us, debates the prob- 
lems of faith with us, and such victories as he 
wins are also ours. Browning leaves us be- 
hind as he storms his Avay into the heaven of 
his unclouded hope, but Tennyson stays with 
us in a world which, being such as it is, is 
never without a shadow. The more clearly we 
see the eternal, the more deeply are we en- 
shrouded in the finite. 

The most interesting fact in connection 
with our subject is the thorough discussion 
Christianity is now undergoing m literature ; 
and Tennyson is the undoid)ted leader in the 
debate. It is not only in the highest form of 
literary art, but it is based on the latest and 
fullest science. He turns evolution into faith, 
and makes it the ground of hope. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 93 

It is not in tlio "In Moinoriam," howovor, 
but in tlio " ItlylLs" that wo have his fullost 
explication of Christianity. It is fortunate that 
Milton (lid not carry out his purpose to use the 
Arthurian Lej^ends. The poetry would have 
been iine enough, but one shudders to think 
what would have become of the stories after 
passing through the crucible of the Puritan 
theology. What they meant when first told on 
winter nights about the tables of mediieval 
barons is uncertain, for they always wore a 
mystic cast. But whatever they originally 
meant, they always containcHl tlu* germ oi' the 
meaning that Tennyson pnt Into them. It is 
thus that the spirit of Christianity works, — 
filling all the moulds of thought with itself, 
changing glimmerings of light into full sun- 
shine. These " Idylls" are sermons or treatises; 
they deal with all sins, faults, graces, virtues, 
— character in all its phases and forms and 
processes put under a conception of Christ 
which twenty centuries have evolved, con- 
firmed by the insight of the poet. 

But while a profound interpreter, Tennyson 
refuses to play the part of ])rophet, and there 
is at the close of the "Passing of Arthur" 
that same half-falteriug note heard throughout 



94 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

"In Memoriam." It is not the defect of faith 
nor the excess of doubt, but the insight of 
one who sees that this is an unfolding uni- 
verse, that the future wiU not be like the past, 
and that mystery infolds it from first to last. 
His attitude is that of Job, who never gained 
the solution of life he longed for, but gained 
instead a trust in God, who, though he spoke 
out of the whirlwind of a tumultuous and con- 
tradictory world, yet showed order and pur- 
pose throughout it. Trust even with a shadow 
of doubt upon it is higher than behef. And 
so Tennyson brings the " Round Table which 
was an image of the mighty world " to an 
end. " New men, strange faces, other minds " 
are to come on. 

" The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
And God fulfills himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 

But Arthur will not so leave his last knight ; 
the poet will not close up the present with 
ruin and open no way into the future. The 
past with its broken circle of knights, some 
following " wandering fires," some hunting 
the Grad, — type of how much vain work in 
the name of God, — some treacherous, and all 
brought to nought in the " last, dim, weird 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 95 

battle of the west " where Christian and 
heathen are fatally confused, and Arthur is 
mortally hurt while he slays false Modred with 
Excalibur, sword of the spirit ; — not thus 
does the poet close the page of history. The 
striving world, the struggling soul, — interpret 
it as you will, — does not end its career on a 
field of " ever-shifting sand " so shrouded in 
" death-white mist " that " friend slew friend, 
not knowing whom he slew," and " ev'n on 
Arthur fell confusion : " — what a picture of 
the world as it fares on its uncertain way, — 
its doubtful battles, its shifting ground, its 
mistaken leadership, its disputes in the name 
of peace, its confusion of spirit and form, its 
conquests that yield no apparent gain, or a 
gain that only involves further strife ! But 
not thus does the poet leave a too true picture 
of the world and of life. Modred is slain ; the 
sword of the spirit does its work ; falsehood 
is crushed. Some gain is made even when the 
battle is lost. Arthur, king of righteous and 
peaceful order, and lord of his own soul, must 
pass, but he does not pass to death. Human- 
ity does not end its career on mist-shrouded 
battlefields, nor " on this bank and shoal of 
time." Arthur leaves as a link with the future 



96 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

a weak but faithful warrior with the Injunction 
to pray : — 

" More things are wrought by prjiyer 
Thau this world dreams of." 

The battle is lost, as all battles seemingly are, 
for what is human life but a lost battle ? — 
but prayer remains ; the invisible world is still 
an open field. The battle is lost, but — 

" The whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 

Life has no full victory, but it has trust in 
God. Arthur dies fighting-, confused, but still 
knowing well how to discern a lie from the 
truth, and his soul passes, borne by Faith, 
Hope, and Love into its own eternal world. 
Explain life we cannot, nor can we forecast 
the history of the world, but we can trust 
both soul and world in the hands of God, 
leaving the mystery of existence with Him 
who is Being itself. 

Such is the lesson taught by Tennyson. It 
was also taught by Job ; it was taught and 
lived out by Christ. Truth came to the Cross ; 
its victory is not a won battle, but a conflict 
for truth unto death. It is when literature 
explicates this central truth of Christianity 
that it reaches its own highest point of possi- 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 97 

ble achievement ; for literature cannot surpass 
what is greatest and deepest in hfe. 

It is in such poems as these that Christian- 
ity has succeeded in reembodying itself in this 
last century. 

The value of these restatements of Chris- 
tianity, especially by the poets, is beyond esti- 
mate. They are the real defenders of the 
Faith, the prophets and priests whose succes- 
sion never fails. 

It is the poets who keep faith in the world. 
Christianity does not depend upon polemical 
defenders who often " dismiss the controversy 
bleeding," nor upon textual criticism and the 
consequent broader or narrower ground for 
faith, — in either case an empirical defense. 
It depends rather upon the vindication it se- 
cures in the master spirits of the world, and 
upon the forms in which they clothe their 
thought. Whatever happens to the text of 
Scripture, the truth as it comes from such 
souls will stand. The poets are unimpeach- 
able ; they are truer than history, for they tes- 
tify to what they have felt as well as seen. 
Christianity cannot be demonstrated, nor can 
it be overthrown by external attacks. It is re- 
vealed ; it comes through prophets who strug- 



9» ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

gle in the conflicts of life while their eyes are 
open to heaven. 

To amend for a scanty treatment of our 
theme we will briefly enumerate the chief 
ways in which Literature becomes the inter- 
preter of Christianity. 

1. Literature interprets Christianity cor- 
rectly for the plain reason that both are keyed 
to the spirit. The inspiration of high litera- 
ture is that of truth ; it reveals the nature 
and meaning of things, which is the office of 
the Spirit, that takes the things of Christ and 
shows them unto us, even as the poet inter- 
prets life, — two similar and sympathetic pro- 
cesses. 

2. Literature, with few exceptions, stands 
squarely upon humanity and insists upon it 
on ethical grounds and for ethical ends ; and 
this is essential Christianity. 

3. Literature in its highest forms is un- 
worldly. It is a protest against the worldly 
temper, the worldly motive, the worldly habit. 
It appeals to the spiritual and the invisible ; 
it readily allies itself with all the greater 
Christian truths and hopes, and becomes their 
mouthpiece. 

4. The greater literature is prophetic and 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 99 

optimistic. Its keynote is, " All is well ; " 
and it accords with the Christian secret; 
" Behold, I make all things new." 

5. Literature, in its higher ranges, is the 
corrective of poor thinking, — that which is 
crude, extravagant, superstitious, hard, one- 
sided. This is especially true in the realm of 
theological thought. The theology of the 
West, with its passion for clearness and imme- 
diate effectiveness, is mechanical and prosaic ; 
it pleases the ordinary mind, and, therefore, a 
democratic age insists on it ; it is a good tool 
for priestcraft ; it is easily defended by formal 
logic : but it does not satisfy the thinker, 
and it is abhorrent to the poet. Hence, 
thoroughly as it has swayed the Occidental 
world, it has never commanded the assent of 
its choicest minds. Hence the long line of 
mystics through whom hes the true continuity 
of Christian theology, always verging upon 
poetry and often reaching it. A theology 
that insists on a transcendent God who sits 
above the world and spins the thread of its 
affairs as a spinner at a wheel ; that holds to 
such a conception of God because it involves 
the simplest of several perplexing proposi- 
tions; that resents immanence as involving 

LciC. 



100 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

pantheism ; that makes two catalogues, — the 
natural and the supernatural, — and puts 
everything it can understand into one list 
and everything it cannot understand into the 
other, and then makes faith turn upon accept- 
ing this division ; — such a theology does 
not command the assent of those minds who 
express themselves in literature ; the poet, 
the man of genius, the broad and universal 
thinker, pass it by ; they stand too near God 
to be deceived by such renderings of his 
truth. All the while, in every age, these 
children of light have made their protest; 
and it is through them that the chief gains 
in theological thoujjht have been secured. 

For the most part the greater names in 
literature have been true to Christ, and it is 
the Christ in them that has corrected theo- 
logy, redeeming it from dogmatism, and mak- 
ing it capable of belief, — not clear perhaps, 
but profound. 

It may not be amiss to add to this paper 
a word of Benediction. Let it be drawn not 
from the Christian Scriptures, but from a 
page of modern literature that combines their 
inmost thought with truest form of literary 



CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 101 

art, — each lending itself to the other in such 
a way as to show their ordained relation : — 

" 'T was August, and the fierce sun overhead 
Sinoto on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, 
And the pale weaver, througli his wiudow seen 
In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited ; 

" I met a preacher there I knew, and said : 
' 111 and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene ?• 
' Uravely 1 ' said ho ; ' for I of late have been 
Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.' 

" O human soul, as long as thou canst so 
Set up a mark of everlasting light. 
Above the howling senses* ebb and flow, 

" To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam, 
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night 1 
Thou mak'st the heaven thou bop'st indeed thy home. " 

Matthew Arnold. 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 



" Hero in the soul's secret chambers are Fausts more subtle 
than Faust, Hamlets more mysterious than Hamlet, Lears more 
distracted and desolate than Lear ; wills that do what they allow 
not, and what they would not do ; wars in the members ; bodies 
of death to be carried, as in Paul ; wild horses of the mind, gov- 
erned by no rein, as in Plato ; subtleties of cunning, plausibilities 
of seeming virtues, memories writ in letters of fire, great thoughts 
heaving under the brimstone marl of revenges, pains of wrong 
and of sympathy with suffering wrong, aspirations that have lost 
courage, hates, loves, beautiful dreams, and tears ; all these act- 
ing at cross purposes and representing, as it were to sight, the 
broken order of mind. Getting into the secret working, and see- 
ing how the drama goes on in so many mystic parts, the wondrous 
life-scene takes on a look at once brilliant and pitiful and appall- 
ing, and what we call the person becomes a world of boundless 
capacities, shaken out of their law, energies in full conflict and 
without government, passions that are wild, sorrows that are 
•weak." — HouAOK Busunbll, Building Eras, p. 233. 



" My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 

That, after Last, returns the First, 
Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 

That what began best, can't end worst, 
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst." 

Browning, Apparent Failure. 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 

The trouble with those who deny Sliake- 
speare's authorship of the plays usually as- 
cribed to him is that they cannot believe in a 
miracle. How can this ^reat thin^ come out 
of Warwickshire, — a hundred miles away 
from London, — this son of a wool-comber, this 
truant deer-stealer who never saw Oxford, yet 
writing plays such as the world had not heard 
before nor has heard since ? It was a miracle 
indeed, but of the kind that is all the while 
hai)pening in a world that is greatly in need 
of what a miracle only can yield. For genius 
is a miracle ; that is, it is inexplicable, lialzac, 
in the preface of " Le P^re Goriot," says that 
" chance is the great romance-maker of the 
ages." It might be said that it also makes the 
romancers, for they appear as by chance, — 
unheralded and without apparent cause. Here 
is this boy Hawthorne, born in Salem a cen- 
tury ago, son of generations of 8hi])masters, 
not a touch of genius in ancestors or kindred, 
in a community absorbed in commerciaUsm 



106 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

and at that time singularly free from any 
flame at which genius could kindle its torch. 
At the age of fourteen he goes to Maine to 
reside with an uncle for a time ; returns to 
Salem and prepares for Bowdoin College, 
where he has Longfellow as a classmate, and 
Franklin Pierce as a friend. He proves to be 
an indiiferent scholar, and shows no signs of 
genius, unless it be an undue love of solitude 
and a brooding disposition that might argue 
either dullness or unusual intelligence. Genius 
has no clear signs. Nothing heralds it, and it 
has no true authentication until it does some 
work that stamps it as its own. 

The authentication came late with Haw- 
thorne. Three years after graduation in 1825, 
he published anonymously a short novel — 
" Fanshawe " — that had no sale, and was so 
slightly regarded by himself that he destroyed 
most of the first edition, with the result that 
not more than five copies are in existence. It 
had, however, the touch that is the peculiar 
charm of his later writings. For the next ten 
or twelve years he produced almost nothing, 
at least nothing commensurate with the long 
period of time and apparent leisure. Yet, he 
regarded literature as his vocation, and was 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 107 

striving to live by his pen. He wrote a group 
of seven short stories which he burned, with 
how much wealth of genius in them we do not 
know. That they were rejected by seventeen 
publishers is no sign that they lacked this 
subtle quality. Nothing is so elusive and so 
shy of recognition as genius, for the simple 
reason that there is no rule by which it can be 
measured. The publishers have a little math- 
ematical machine by which they can, in a mo- 
ment, tell you how many printed pages will be 
required for your bulky pile of manuscript ; 
but they have not yet found a machine that 
will measure or even detect the presence of 
that imponderable and unmeasurable thing 
called genius. The only approach to such a 
machine is some rare human being who hap- 
pens (and here the miracle again comes in) to 
have a spark of it — latent or active — in his 
own composition. Doubtless these seven tales 
were full of the qualities that give priceless 
value to the few stories that are left. Nor is 
it strange that he did not himself detect the 
divine spark that glowed within them. Genius 
is like the eye which sees all things except it- 
self. Hawthorne had a way of burning his 
productions whenever the hour of weakness 



108 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

or self-distrust — such as often visits men of 
genius — came to him. Mr. James T. Fields 
told the writer — in the sixties — that Haw- 
thorne, having got well into the " Scarlet 
Letter," invited him to Salem to hear it read. 
Hawthorne was disposed to destroy it, and 
that might have been its fate had not Mr. 
Fields, who, better than any man of his day, 
knew a book when he saw one, interposed 
with a publisher's authority, and so saved one 
which Mr. Woodberry — Hawthorne's latest 
biographer — says is " a great and unique ro- 
mance, standing apart by itself in fiction ; 
there is nothing else quite like it." 

There is but little to tell of him biographi- 
cally ; and far less concerning his inner life ; 
or, this would be the case were it not that a 
writer who deals chiefly with the human soul, 
and spreads it out in scores of characters, can- 
not fail also to reveal himself. He was shy to 
the last degree, and he early formed what he 
called " a cursed habit of solitude ; " but the 
accuracy with which he uncovers the hidden 
workins: of the hearts of others becomes a 
mirror in which his own heart is pictured. At 
first, one is inchned to think him a cold, im- 
passive writer, who holds the mirror up to 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LilTTER 109 

Nature, — himself simply steadying- it while 
the artist looks through and declares what he 
sees. But a full reading somewhat alters one's 
opinion of him. It does not follow that the 
recluse is indifferent to humanity ; he may be 
simply less gregarious, or he has less need of 
others, or finds his best development in soli- 
tude, or is called to some task that requires a 
steady gaze at certain types of life without 
disturbing them with spoken words. It is easy 
to say that had Hawthorne's contact with the 
world been closer, and had he been reared in 
a richer and more complex society, his writ- 
ings would have been less sombre and more 
varied in their themes. Mr. Henry James — 
his severest critic while a great admirer — 
grants that the simplicity of his life was in his 
favor ; " it helped him to appear complete and 
homogeneous." But when Mr. James seems 
to limit him by declaring that he is " intensely 
and vividly local," one pauses to ask if local 
color hinders universality of treatment. He 
had the independence and originality of his 
own genius, but he found his subjects in New 
England. His chief theme was the play of 
conscience under a sense of sin and guilt. 
Now, nothing is truer than that this theme 



110 7.SSAYS FOR THE DAY 

had wide illustration in New England, and 
especially in its theology, where it was an or- 
ganic factor. The reality of sin ; its destruc- 
tive effect on character ; its doomlike aspect ; 
the horrible certainty of its result ; the im- 
possibility of escape from it except by a special 
and personal decree of God ; the haunting 
misery of it, fed by uncertainty as to escape ; 
the tragedy that not seldom sprang out of it 
in every community, — all this was familiar 
to Hawthorne ; but it is a singular fact that, 
while treating the generic truth, he never 
seriously touches the prevalent theological 
aspects of it. It is not the sin, nor the guilt, 
nor the reprobation of the New England theo- 
logy exclusively that yields him his themes. 
Had he established a closer relation to it in 
his plots, he might almost have been claimed 
as an adherent or a critic of it. But he can- 
not be located in that region of thought. 
Neither sin, nor guilt, nor remorse, belongs 
exclusively to the Puritan, nor to any theo- 
logy, though wrought into all. They belong 
to humanity as parts of its universal problem, 
and it is as such that Hawthorne treated 
them. Thus he escaped the charge of pro- 
vincialism. It is no derogation to admit that 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 111 

he was, in one sense, provincial, — like Burns 
and Scott, — but his genius was adequate to 
his standing in the broad field of universal 
humanity in company with the great masters 
of it. ^ 

Why did Hawthorne choose this one theme, 
— sin and its consequences, — hardly putting 
pen to paper except to set down something 
bearing on it ? He was not what is usually 
termed a religious man ; that note was not 
fully accentuated in him ; though what depths 
of spiritual feeling were hidden in that never- 
revealed heart let no man attempt to measure. 
Nor did he take an interest in the theological 
debates that clustered about sin. Orthodox 
and Unitarian were one or nothing with him ; 
their contentions will pass, his remain as new 
and as old as humanity. He took no inter- 
est in reforms, and held himself aloof from 
every practical question of social hfe and 
activity except when forced to it by the neces- 
sity of a hvelihood, — for until he was forty- 
six chill penury was his lot. Why, then, did ''■'' 
he choose sin as his theme? For the same 
reason that the great masters in literature al- 
ways gravitate to it. The Hebrews put it into 
the first pages of their sacred books. Job 



112 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

chose it, and set a pace often followed but 
not yet .overtaken. The Greeks built their 
drama upon it. Shakespeare and Goethe could 
not justify their genius except as over and 
over again they dealt with it. Dante put it 
under heaven and hell and all between. Mil- 
ton could find no theme adequate to his 
genius but " man's first disobedience." Shall 
we say, then, that a great genius makes sin 
his theme because it suits his purpose as an 
artist? Let us not so belie him. He takes it 
because it is the greatest theme, and also be- 
cause it falls in either with his convictions as 
in the case of Milton, or with his temperament 
as in the case of Hawthorne. And why is it 
great? Because it is a violation of the order 
of the world, and is the defeat of humanity. 
It throws human nature wide open to our 
gaze; we look on the ruin, and see man's 
greatness ; on his misery, and so uncover pity, 
which becomes a redeeming force. Thus it 
opens the whole wide play of human life in 
its highest and deepest relations. Nothing so 
interests men as their sins and defeats. Tra- 
gedy is born of them, and tragedy fixes ever- 
more the steady gaze of mankind. Genius is 
its own interpreter; it makes few mistakes. 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LEfTER 113 

Hawthorne wrote four novels and seven or 
eight short stories, all turning on sin, and he 
never errs in its analysis, its operation, or its 
effect, though he stops short of finality. His 
characters are infallibly true to themselves. 
He is always logical. The environment suits 
the case down to slightest details. Nature 
conforms to the tragedy, either illuminating 
or darkening the play as it goes on, but al- 
ways with rigid fidelity. His entire work is 
bathed in truth. Never does he weaken its 
absoluteness by introducing his personal be- 
lief, though occasionally, in his " Note-Books," 
he gives us a glimpse of himself, like this : 
" When I write anything that I know or sus- 
pect to be morbid, I feel as though I had told 
a lie." 

He has no theory of his own ; it is the 
same old story : eating forbidden fruit ; hid- 
ing from God ; losing Paradise ; tempted of 
woman ; tempted of Satan ; tempted of Mam- 
mon ; sowing to the flesh and reaping corrup- 
tion ; a deceived heart feeding on ashes ; 
death the wages of sin, — and no clear 
glimpse of a way out. If stated in modern 
phrase, it would be this: whatever a man 
does, he does to himself. There is no pro- 



114 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

fouuder truth in morals or religion or life 
than this. The Puritan tlio()lo<j;y obscured it 
in its doctrine of sin and of redemption. 
Botli were weakened hy ovei'-localization out- 
side ot' the man himself — putting- sin in the 
prop^enitor of the race, and redemption into 
im[)utati<)n and an expiatory process. How- 
ever uncertainly those doctrines are held to- 
day, they still cast a hlindin*^ shadow upon 
ethics, and make it dillicult to persuade men 
that whatsoever they sow they shall reap. 

It is enoujii'li to say of Hawthorne, at this 
point, that nowhere in literature is this truth 
taught more clearly, — with such freedom 
from the alloy of dogmatic obscuration, with 
such absence of personal prejudice, — one 
might ahuost say of feeling, — with such so- 
lenniity, such tragic force and poetic beauty, 
and, above all, such closeness to life, as are to 
be found in these four novels and the stories. 

We will take a closer look at the greatest 
of them. What shall be said of the " Scarlet 
Letter ; " where shall it be located in the realm 
of Literature? It is not a love story, nor a 
romance, nor an allegory, nor a j)arable, nor 
a historical novel, though it has something of 



NOTES ON THE SCAKLpyf LETTER 115 

oacli. It (!()ineH near being n doj^ina HCit in 
l(!iin.s oi' loal life, and made vivid by inionHo 
action; but llawtliorno (;.-ii-(;d n()tbiii<>' i'or 
<l<)<i^ina of any Hoit. What, tlion, sliall it bo 
call(Ml ? It niuHt <>'<> witliont (tlasHiiication. It 
is a Htndy of a cortain form of sin iiiado 
j»ra|)liic by conditions b(,'Ht cal(;ulatud to in- 
tcinsily oacb i^saturo. Mi'h. Ilawtiiorno Haid 
tliat during tlio six nionUm hv, wan writing it 
hin forehoad woro a knot. Bo will the nvidoi-'H, 
if lie reads as carorully as Hawthorne wrote. 

It waH ])ul>lisbed in !(Sr»(), wlu^n Ilawtborno 
was i'orty-six years of age. Jt has, lirst of all, 
this distinction : it is — as Mr. James says 
— "the finest piece oi' imaginative? writing 
yet put forth in tin? country." In tlie half- 
century since;, a true and full American lit- 
erature has been produ(!ed : authors of high 
merit have secured a lasting place ; and others 
of l(!ss merit have given us works of fiction 
that s(!ll almost by the million, but none that 
are worthy to stand by the side of this short 
story of sin and shame and remorse. What 
is claimed for it in this country is freely 
acc()rd(!d abroad, though, of course;, no com- 
parisons are made with the long annals of 
English literature, where there are names that 



116 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

defy comparison. It is, however, read more 
widely there than here, and is held in steadier 
estimate than we accord, who read as grega- 
riously as sheep crop the grass. We simply 
state the consensus in which it is held in our 
American world of letters when we say that 
it is the most consummate work in literature 
yet produced in this country. 

The explanation of the permanent high 
estimate of the " Scarlet Letter " — for it 
■would be as safe to wager on it as on the 
Bank of England — is the absolute perfec- 
tion of its art and corresponding subtilty and 
correctness of thought, and, not least, a style 
that both fascinates and commands. If it is 
criticised on slight points, — as that it has too 
much symbolism, that the story is mixed with 
parable, and the like, — we grant or deny as 
we see fit ; but we brush all this aside, we 
turn to the book again and close it with a 
sigh, or something deeper than a sigh, — even 
thought, — and pronounce it perfect. 

It is a simple story, told of a simple age, 
Greek in its severity, having only four char- 
acters : a wife forgetful of her vows ; a cler- 
gyman forgetful of more than his vows ; a 
wronged husband, left in England, but brought 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 117 

forward ; a little child, — these and no more, 
save the people, individually unimportant, but 
necessary to form a background for the tra- 
gedy. Boston is not yet half a century old, ' 
Puritan to the core, hot still with a hatred of 
the tyranny and sin it had crossed the ocean 
to escape, governed by the letter of Scrip- 
ture wherein was found the command that an 
adulteress should die. But some mercy had 
begun to qualify the Hebrew code, and instead 
of death or branding with a hot iron, Hester 
Prynne was condemned to stand upon the 
pillory-platform, wearing upon her breast the 
letter A wrought in scarlet, not only then, 
but ever after. With her babe in her arms 
she faces the people, and sees her husband 
among them, — an old and learned man, — 
who unexpectedly appears and takes his place 
as an avenger. The real history of the tra- 
gedy begins when the young minister, Mr. 
Dimmesdale, is required by the magistrate to 
appeal to Hester to reveal the partner of her 
guilt. Dimmesdale is at no time in the story y 
represented as wholly contemptible. How- 
ever sinful his characters may be, Hawthorne 
always clothes them with a certain human 
dignity. From the first he is the victim of his 



118 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

sin, — suffering the tortures of remorse to a 
degree impossible to Hester, because to the 
first sin he added that of concealment and 
hypocrisy by continuing in his holy office ; 
and, heavier than all, was the sense, that he 
was dragging the cause, in both Church and 
State, for which the colony was founded, down 
to the level of his own degradation. It was 
not for this that Hester, when adjured by him, 
refused to make the declaration for which he 
called, but for love only. The story, at the 
outset, is lifted out of all carnality. Shame 
and remorse have burned up that dross, until 
in time only the capacity to suffer is left, Avhile 
in her heart love remains, — pure always, and 
made purer by acquiescence in her punish- 
ment and the discipline of motherhood. The 
story moves on, most human, but inexorable 
as fate. The scarlet letter on Hester's breast 
almost ceases to do its office. A sense of 
desert and undying love and pity make her 
shame endurable. But Dimmesdale finds no 
relief. The scarlet letter burns itself into his 
flesh, and he dies in late confession for love, 
if not for his soul. 

It would be difficult to find elsewhere so 
'close an analysis of the play of the soul in 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 119 

the supreme moments of life as that of the 
leading' characters, — all brought to the logi- 
cal conclusion of their history. The blending 
of spiritual insight and literary art forms one 
of those triumphs the like of which one may 
look for in vain until one reaches the great 
masters in drama. It also suggests a problem 
in theology that has vexed the souls of men 
from the beginning, and will continue to vex 
them so long as sin and conscience stand 
opposed to each other. The problem is that 
of forgiveness : is it ever fully won ? The 
plot goes no farther than their contrasted 
destiny. The curtain drops when the chief 
actor dies. If here and there it is lifted for 
a moment, or swept aside by some gust of 
irrepressible grief, it springs from hope, not 
from the main purpose. It is in Hester that 
riddance from sin comes nearest a possibility. 
Her acceptance and patient endurance of her 
penalty, without suffering it wholly to break 
her heart or her will, become a natural and 
real atonement that yields, if not peace, some- 
thins: of more value. The current of her life 
ran on in its natural channel in the light 
of day, before the eyes of the people. The 
contrast at the last between her strength and 



120 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

his weakness was not between a strong woman 
and a weak man, — each such by nature, — 
but between them as each came to be under 
the discipline of the seven years of experi- 
ence so differently borne. Dimmesdale was 
not originally a weak man ; had he been, the 
story would have lost point and emphasis, and 
would have sunk to the level of a vulvar 
scandal of every-day life. Hawthorne quickly 
lifts the narrative out of that region, and 
confines it to the world where only moral and 
spiritual forces fill the stage. But under the 
concealment of his sin Dimmesdale gave way 
at every point ; all the sources of his strength 
were dried up by the hypocrisy in which he 
had wrapped himself, and he grew steadily 
weaker, while Hester gained a certain ro- 
bustness of will without loss of her love. 
Hawthorne here comes very near preaching. 
Indeed, he seldom does anything else ; it is 
the function of genius to preach. Give him 
a text, put on him the Geneva gown, and you 
have a preacher of universal orthodoxy fulfill- 
ing his calling with awful veracity. 

But Hawthorne will not allow the tragedy 
to sink into the hopelessness of reprobation, 
— not that he cared for the doctrine one way 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 121 

or the other, but, as an interpreter of evil 
and as a hterary artist, he could not leave 
Dimmesdale absolutely where his sin placed 
him ; for, in one character, he saw that evil, 
simply because it is evil, is a mystery, and as 
an artist he could not map out human pas- 
sion in mathematical lines. It had stripped 
Dimmesdale of all that was best, obscured his 
judgment, defeated his love, bhnded him to 
the distinction between good and evil, over- 
thrown his will, involved his body in the sin 
of his soul, and brought him to the verge of 
death ; but something is left that revives as 
soon as he clasps the hand of his child, and 
— leaning on Hester — he mounts the scaffold 
where she at first had stood alone and taken 
on herself the punishment he should have 
shared with her. Under his decision to confess 
he revives, and begins to move aright. The 
scene changes. Each character is transformed. 
Confession begins to do its work. A far step 
is taken in the next word : " ' Is not this bet- 
ter,' murmured he, ' than what we dreamed of 
in the forest ? ' " — meaning flight together, 
at Hester's suggestion, for his sake. Here he 
regains something of himself ; better to die 
a true man than to flee a false one. Hester 



122 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

can see the matter in but one light. She had 
slowly worked out a conscious redemption 
through " shame, despair, and solitude." She 
had not sunk to his depth, and she could not 
rise to the height to which confession was 
lifting him. She cannot escape the constraint 
of her love and pity. She had freed herself ; 
she thought she could free him. ^"1 know 
not,' she replied. * Better ? yea : so we may 
both die, and Httle Pearl die with us ! ' " In 
Hester the passion of love dominates ; let it 
be death if we can die together ; but in him 
the passion of a soul achieving deliverance 
from sin in the only possible way is stronger, 
and he is ready to die even if it be alone. He 
exults in the confession he is about to make 
before the people. It is the fifty-first Psalm 
over again. Had Hawthorne read St. Augus- 
tine ? Or was it the insight of genius brood- 
ing in long silence on the way of a guilty soul 
emerging from the hell of measureless sin? 
Nowhere does Hawthorne rise so high in 
tragic skill and power as in the confession 
that foUows when Dimmesdale uncovers his 
breast and shows burnt into his flesh the let- 
ter Hester had worn openly upon her bosom. 
Here are the stigmata of the early saints, 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 123 

brought out by sin instead of by self -absorp- 
tion in the crucified One. The final and only 
atonement is made, and he sinks upon the 
scaffold to die. Forgiving his tormentor 
whom he had wronged, he turns to his child, 
where the tragedy completes itself. 

Pearl is the one consummate flower of Haw- 
thorne's genius, — unsurpassed by himself and 
absolutely original. There is woven into her 
the entire history of these two suffering but 
diverse souls, which she must fulfill and yet 
preserve her perfect childhood. She sets forth 
the sin of her parents without a trace of its 
guilt, yet reflects the moral chaos in which it 
had involved her. This is done with matchless 
art : — "an elf child," the people called her, 
passing from one mood to another as though 
a double nature, an Undine as yet without 
soul, but restless because it is withheld ; or, 
as Mr. Dimmesdale himself had described her, 
having no " discoverable principle of being 
save the freedom of a broken law ; " and there 
is added a far-reaching word : " whether capa- 
ble of good, I know not." Hawthorne does 
not here hint at inheritance of natural disposi- 
tion, but has in mind a possible transmission 
of the confusion springing out of a violation 



124 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

of the moral order. It was not a dream of 
human love that passed into her being, but 
something stronger than love. 

His thought here runs very deep. This 
child of guilty passion inherited not the pas- 
sion, but a protesting conscience that always 
put her at odds with herself. As Chilling- 
worth was the malignant conscience that de- 
stroyed Dimmesdale, Pearl was the natural con- 
science that wholesomely chastened her mother 
so long as the inevitable penalty lasted. This 
ministration is strikingly brought out in the 
profoundest chapter of the book, where Hes- 
ter's inner life is disclosed. One is tempted, 
as one follows it, to ask if Hawthorne suffered 
his own thoughts to wander into the region 
where the question of woman's place and rights 
in human society was undergoing heated dis- 
cussion. The din of it filled his ears unless he 
closed them, as he usually did when anything 
like reform met them. But in this tender and 
sympathetic chapter he tells where Hester's 
thoughts often led her, and where she surely 
would have followed them had she been free 
to fulfill her dreams. It certainly was where 
his thouo-hts would not have ffone. But as in 
Tennyson's " Princess " a child solved the prob- 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 125 

lem, SO here Pearl and motherhood dispelled 
her dreams and kept her within the lines of 
natural duty. In every case Pearl dominates 
the situation, whether she be regarded as a 
symbohzed conscience or as a child. The story 
throughout is a drama of the spirit ; the real 
and the spiritual play back and forth with 
something more than metaphor, for each is 
both real and spiritual. She is woven with 
endless symbolism into every page ; from the 
first wail in the prison where she was born, 
the child sets the keynote and keeps it to the 
end. The brook in the forest ran through 
black shadows and through sunshine, and 
babbled in two voices. " * What does this sad 
little brook say, mother ? ' inquired she. ^ If 
thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook 
might tell thee of it, even as it is telling me 
of mine.' " Here is a sermon in running 
brooks deeper than the Duke heard, — the re- 
sponse of nature to the inner spirit of man. 

But this contradiction that ran through the 
child passes away as soon as the purpose of 
confession enters the heart of Dimmesdale, 
whom before she had shunned so long as he 
and her mother talked of flight. As the two 
meet upon the scaffold after treading their 



126 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

bitter but diverse paths, and become spiritu- 
ally one through this confession, the child 
mingles her life with theirs through the truth 
that now invests them, and proves that " she 
has a heart by breaking it." Here we have 
the purest idealism, Greek in the delicacy of 
its allusions, and Hebrew in its ethical sincer- 
ity. What Hawthorne has in mind all along 
is that a sin involving hypocrisy can in no 
way be undone or gotten over except by con- 
fession, and so getting back into the truth. \ 
Dramatic art requires that it shall involve all 
the actors, — Chillingworth as well as Hester. 
Though a wronged husband, he was fiendish 
in his revenge, and as false as Dimmesdale. 
Any other writer of romance would have 
hurled him to a doom of fire or flood. But 
Hawthorne has other uses for him. He is the 
malignant conscience of Dimmesdale, ^as Pearl 
is the beneficent conscience of Hester. All 
the dramatis personce must be subdued into 
the likeness of the common motive ; and so 
Hawthorne places ChilHngworth on the scaf- 
fold, where the mingled atmosphere of uncon- 
querable love and repentance enfolds him. 
He calls it a defeat ; " thou hast escaped me," 
he said to Dimmesdale ; but it was more than 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 127 

defeat. Hawthorne leaves room for the thought 
at least that something of good found its way 
into his poor soul and stayed there. 

We must acquit Hawthorne here, and on 
every other page of his works, from aiming 
at mere effect, but we cannot fail to see that 
in this last scene he comes near losing him- 
self and letting his pity carry him beyond 
the point where the logic of his story left 
Dimmesdale ; for to have wholly absolved him 
from his sin would have carried the writer 
beyond his purpose to unfold the working of 
broken law, — a thing not to be tampered 
with by an over-sympathetic pen. Hawthorne 
was neither a skeptic, nor a pessimist, nor a 
cold-hearted man ; he was widely the reverse 
of each. It was the intensity of his faith in 
the moral laws and in the reality of goodness, 
and the delicacy and strength of his sympathy, 
that made him capable of writing in an un- 
failing strain of justice tempered, but not set 
aside, by pity. 

But behind these qualities was the artistic 
sense, which — in a great man — is one with 
his power and insight, and he could write only 
what he saw and knew ; for art is authorita- 
tive. Tennyson was once asked why he did 



128 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

not j^ive " In Menioriam " a happier ending, — 
a Paradiso with its vision of God instead of a 
great hope only. He replied, " I have written 
what I have felt and known, and I will never 
write anytiiing else." Hawthorne could say 
the same of himself ; and we might add that 
his sense of art, as well as his sense of truth, 
held him in leash. His reserve, however tem- 
peramental, is a sign of his consummate skill 
as a literary artist. On what page, in what 
sentence, does he fall short? The reader 
turns over the last page and feverishly de- 
mands the next scene in the tragedy, but finds 
only hints or nothing at all ; the characters 
sink back into the mystery from which they 
emerged. They move like spirits in a world 
inireal except as their truth makes it real. 
Hence their intangibleness ; they haunt one 
in the guise of the quality they set forth, but 
beyond that they do not exist. They stand 
for no person, but only for some law — kept 
or broken — which they symbolize. There is 
no Dimmesdale, nor Hester, nor Pearl, nor 
Chillingworth, but only shadows of broken 
law working out its consequences in ways of 
penalty wrought into the Eternal Order. 
They stay but a moment, and — like a faded 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 129 

j)u<»'i3iint — disappear ; but while they stay, 
tlie deepest meanings of life are set before us 
in forms of transeendent power, and beeome 
permanent in onrselves. 

This ready irnj)artation of id(;as is ev(!ry- 
where a marked feature of 1 lawthorne's works, 
'' due to the absolute sincerity of their ethical 
elements, their perfection of lit(;rary form 
and their pervasive humanity. To doubt the 
last factor is to rob his g-enius of its main- 
spring. The severity of his treatment grows 
out of the accuracy of his logic. He deals 
with mystery and, tlxirefore, says little, only 
enough to show that whatever a man does he 
does to himself J that obedience is light, and 
disobedience is darkness in which, because no- 
thing can be s(!(!n, there is nothing to be said. 
Still, Hawthorne does not hohl it to be 
contrary to his opinions or his art to suffer 
gleams of hope to illumine even the dark(!st 
of his pages. With a masterly touch at the 
very beginning of the " Scarlet Letter," he 
expressly states this to be a feature of the 
story he is about to tell. lie puts by the door 
of the prison, wluire Ifestfir was confined, 
" a wild rosebush," and says, " it may serve, 
let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral 



130 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

blossom, that may be found along the track, 
or relieve the darkening close of a tale of 
human frailty and sorrow." Therefore, in the 
last scene there are almost forecasts of a good 
outcome. In the child the spell that drove 
her apart from her father is broken, and with 
tears she kisses his dying lips. Hester raises 
the unconquerable question of love : " * Shall 
we not spend our immortal life together ? 
Thou lookest far into eternity with those 
bright dying eyes ! Then tell me what thou 
seest ? '" Hester was mistaken. Her cleansed^ 
eyes could see, but his could not with any 
certainty ; he had lived in the dark too long 
for clear vision. And yet Hawthorne will not 
hide the end behind so dark a pall. The rose 
at the prison door blossoms into a hope. The 
moralizing of the great master is not for- 
gotten : " There is some soul of goodness in 
things evil." Dimmesdale remembers that 
there is recovery through suffering, and that it 
is a sign of mercy. Having set his ignominy 
before the people, his death becomes trium- 
phant, and he departs with words of praise and 
submission. Still, Hawthorne will neither 
assert nor deny, but leaves each to read the 
story in his own way. 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 131 

It is not well to look for a doctrine in this 
masterly and carefully balanced picture. Haw- 
thorne did not intend one; he drew from a 
broader field than that of dogma. One may 
hope where one cannot well believe. Belief is 
special ; hope is universal. Dimmesdale stated 
his own case correctly, — a confused and con- 
flicting statement, because having long lived a 
He its bewildering confusion impregnated all 
his thought. In Hester life has done its worst 
and its best, and, brooded over continually 
by truth, she emerges clear-eyed, and sees — 
shall we say heaven or hell ? — She cared not, 
so long as she could be with him. One is here 
reminded of Dante's Francesca in the " In- 
ferno," " swept about the never resting blast " 
of hell with Paolo, — her only consolation be- 
ing that they would never be separated. Mr. 
Dinsmore, who calls attention to this resem- 
blance in his able book, the " Teachings of 
Dante," thinks that Hawthorne — not having 
then learned Italian — came to it alone. It 
may weU be so, for it is the quality of love to 
transcend all motives beside its own ; and not 
seldom does it cast itself with loss of aU that 
it has in time or eternity, for so it chooses, 
rather than give up itself, — not voluptuous 



132 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

love, but that spiritual passion which makes 
of two souls one. They have no life if they 
are separated. Such was Hester's love. Pen- 
ance had not weakened, but rather had refined 
it, until its spiritual essence only was left with 
its commanding power. This Hawthorne sees 
by the light of his own genius. But to un- 
wind the thread of human fault, and hold it 
up so that it shall shine in a brighter color, is 
a task that he hints at, but does not attempt. 
Still, he touches sin with a firm hand, and 
traces it without flinching to the point where 
it culminates, — always the same ; it separates 
man from God and his fellows, and at last 
from himself ; it returns in retribution, and 
the evil he has done to others he does to him- 
self. A casual reading may set this down as a 
Puritan dogma. It is Puritan, but it is uni- 
versal before it is Puritan. Hawthorne in his 
greater works touched nothing that was only 
and distinctively Puritan. His characters wear 
the garb, but underneath is simply the human 
soul. This distinction is to be made because 
it helps to a right understanding of the book, 
and redeems both it and its author from the 
charge of provincialism, — a derogation not to 
be made concerning a genius whose province 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 133 

lay among themes as broad and universal as 
human nature. 

Hawthorne put no unmeaning words into 
the " Scarlet Letter," and the question may 
arise how far he intended to include Chilling- 
worth in the scene of redemption on the scaf- 
fold, — for such it may be called. The answer 
must be found in Chillingworth's exclamation : 
" Thou hast defeated me ! " Why did he say 
that ? Because Dimmesdale had taken himself 
out of the world of lies, and put himself into 
the hands of the God of truth, and thus 
brought not only himself, but all about him, 
under the redeeming influences that filled the 
air, for even the people went home, as it were, 
smiting their breasts. If the story be a parable, 
the harassing conscience must be set at rest ; 
it is defeated, and Chillingworth no longer 
has a vocation. Dimmesdale had done what 
he had advised him to do : " Wouldst thou 
have me to believe, wise and pious friend, 
that a false show can be better — can be more 
for God's glory, or man's welfare — than God's 
own truth ? " His advice, given in answer to 
Dimmesdale's specious paltering with an eter- 
nal reality, deepened his victim's agony and 
so fed his revenge j but when acted on, his 



134 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

patient passed beyond his reach. He had gone 
deeper than he knew, and had brought to the 
surface a spiritual power that outmastered his 
own. Shall we say that Hawthorne did not in- 
tend to hint that Chillingworth came under 
this greater power, and that, finding himself 
a defeated man through his own suggestion, 
he felt its divineness ? He utters no word of 
malice, no confident boast, no plan of further 
revenge. Instead, what else is seen of him is 
beneficent, and in accord with a nature ori- 
ginally sound and high-minded. Along with 
others, he has been involved in a furious storm 
of human passion, but it passes by when truth 
wins the victory. Hawthorne, like the consum- 
mate artist that he is, never asserts or paints 
in full, but only intimates and leaves the rest 
to the reader ; and so we may believe that the 
tragedy pauses at the door of Chillingworth. 
At the close Hawthorne plays uncertainly and 
•with jest over this strange yet natural char- 
acter. Chillina;worth is reduced to nothinof-' 
ness and withers away, — a logical end, but he 
reappears in a new light as enriching Hester 
and Pearl, — a strange thing to do unless some 
goodness is left in him. Then the author jests 
and sends him literally to the devil, where " he 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 135 

would find tasks enough ' and receive " his 
wages duly." If Hawthorne ever falters it is 
when he plays between the Parable and the 
Komance. Here he drops the former, and 
ends his story — in Walter Scott fashion — 
with a word for each. Evidently he writes 
with a weary pen, yet not with an unpitying 
heart. In the next sentence he would fain 
be merciful to "all these shadowy beings, 
so long our near acquaintances, — as well 
Roger Chilhng worth as his companions;" and 
finally, after a bit of psychological byplay, by 
no means serious, — on the possible identity 
at bottom of hatred and love, — raises the 
question whether the old physician and the 
minister may not find " their earthly stock of 
hatred and antipathy transmitted into golden 
love." Thus, though the " Scarlet Letter" is 
a sad book, the author would not leave it black 
with hopeless sorrow. Even as an artist Haw- 
thorne knew better than to paint his canvas 
in sober colors only ; and as a man he had no 
right to bruise the human heart with needless 
pain. Sad as the " Scarlet Letter" is, we need 
not think him forgetful of Madame Necker's 
saying that " the novel should paint a pos- 
sible better world." But if better, it can be 



136 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

such only through truth and never through 
ies. 

What renders the " Scarlet Letter " one o£ 
the greatest of books is the sleuthhound thor- 
oughness with which sin is traced up and 
down and into every corner of the heart and 
life, and even into nature, where it transforms 
all things. Shakespeare paints with a larger 
brush, and sets it in great tragic happenings ; 
but its windings, the subtle infusion of itself 
into every faculty and impressing itself upon 
outward things, are left for Hawthorne's un- 
approachable skill. This leads us to speak of 
the criticism of Mr. Henry James upon the 
twelfth chapter, where the story reaches its 
climax. Dimmesdale and Hester and Pearl 
stand at night upon the scaffold, where Hester 
had stood alone with her babe seven years be- 
fore. His remorse had reached its lowest 
depth ; its sting lay in the fact that she wore 
the scarlet letter while he went clad in robes 
of unquestioned sanctity. It is the letter that 
torments him, and carries the guilt and shame 
of the whole bitter history. He has come 
into a condition where, because he can think 
of nothing else, he can see nothing else. A 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 137 

meteor flashes across the black sky and paints 
upon a cloud the fatal letter. A page of 
magnificent writing describes the objective 
picture and the heart within which only it 
exists. Mr. James regards it as overworked, 
and, along with a general charge of the same 
overdoing here and there, intimates that the 
author " is in danger of crossing the line that 
separates the sublime from its intimate neigh- 
bor." That Hawthorne should be termed 
ridiculous after being described as '^ a thin 
New Englander with a miasmatic conscience " 
should occasion no surprise. It shows how 
wide apart are the realist and the idealist; 
and also how much nearer the ideaHst comes 
to the facts of the case in hand. 

That Dimmesdale should transfer what he 
saw and felt within to the external world is a 
well-known psychological possibility ; and we 
appeal from the realist to his brother the psy- 
chologist, who says in his recent book that 
" it is one of the peculiarities of invasions 
from the sub-conscious region to take on 
objective appearances." It is needless to say 
that literature, from the Bible down, abounds 
in this transfer of inward feeling to outward 
form. When Balaam had sold his prophetic 



138 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

gift for a price, it was not the ass that re- 
buked him, but his own smiting conscience. 
It was not the witches, but Macbeth, who 
sang, " Fair is foul, and foul is fair," — after 
which all things were inverted : his thoughts 
became ghosts and daggers and a knocking 
at the gate like thunders of doom. Lady Mac- 
beth can see nothing but blood on her white 
hands. Beckford in his " Vathek " (where 
possibly Hawthorne found the suggestion of 
Dimmesdale's habit of placing his hand upon 
his heart) made the dwellers in the Hall of 
Eblis happy in all things except that each 
held his hand over his heart, which had be- 
come "a receptacle of eternal fire." Mr. 
James seems to underestimate the mental con- 
dition into which Dimmesdale has fallen ; he 
strikes the key of the tragedy too low, and 
refers what he regards as excessive to Haw- 
thorne's Puritanism. Now, Puritanism is a 
capacious thing, but it cannot hold all that 
is cast into it ; and much is set down to its 
credit that belongs to a false conception of it. 
Mr. James, in his able biography, insists on 
two things, to which we have already referred, 
as explanatory of Ha^^iihorne : that he was 
provincial, and that he was largely influenced 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 139 

by his Puritan blood. Each is to be taken 
with due allowance. Of course, every man, 
however great his genius, strikes his roots 
down into native soil and draws his life from 
such air as is about him. Something of root 
and air will enter into his mental composition, 
and in some measure he will think with or 
from his environment, and his heart will throb 
with ancestral blood. But it is a quaUty of 
genius that it is not subject to such limita- 
tions. Genius belongs to the domain of na- 
ture; it is cosmic, spiritual, universal. It 
treats these limitations in one of three ways : 
it lifts them into their ideals ; it transcends 
them ; or it extracts their thin essence or 
spirit. The last may be said of Hawthorne. 
Little of Puritanism remained in him except 
its spirituahty, by which we mean its pro- 
found sense of the reality of moral law. Much 
that is set down to him as Puritan was a 
family idiosyncrasy, — an individualism that 
passed all the bounds of early or later Puri- 
tanism. It favored, however, the play of his 
genius in its chosen field. 

To regard him as provincial because Salem 
was provincial, or because habits were simple 
in Massachusetts in the first half of the cen- 



140 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

tiiry, is to miss the source of his strongest 
quality. Hawthorne, by virtue of his brood- 
ing soHtude and the lofty character of his 
thought, which was rooted in his own peculiar 
genius and was fed by an imagination that 
had no need to go outside of itself for ideas 
or theories, was shut off from provincialism 
save perhaps in some matters of personal 
habit. The nearest sign of it was an intense 
love of New England and indifference to the 
mother country where he had lived for years, 
— an unweaned child of his native land. 
There is more in him that offsets Puritanism 
than identifies him with it. In fact, it out- 
did itself, as has continually happened, and 
created in Hawthorne an individualism that 
separated him from itself. A system whose 
central principle is individualism cannot count 
upon holding together its own adherents. It 
is by its own nature centrifugal, though none 
the worse for that ; it makes man a denizen 
of the heavens rather than of this mundane 
sphere. But the way is long, and at great 
cost is it trod. 

It is Hawthorne's peculiarity that he cannot 
be identified with any school of thought. He 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 141 

was a recluse down to the last fibre. He did 
not hate men, but he would not mingle with 
them. He was shy, but in a lofty way. Any 
real alliance in thought or action with others 
was impossible to him. His individualism was 
absolute, but it was temperamental. Socially 
he was closely identified with the transcen- 
dental way of thinking, but it found no 
access to his mind. He and Emerson were 
neighbors, but not intimates. When they 
walked together in Concord they discussed 
the weather and the crops, but not philoso- 
phy, nor religion, nor politics. Oftener they 
were silent, as great men, who know each 
other as such, can afford to be. Tennyson 
and Carlyle once sat together of an evening 
for three hours, smoking, and neither uttering 
a word, except Carlyle's good-night : " Come 
again, Alfred ; we have had a grand time." 
This aloofness from men, and at the same 
time this power of dragging to light the hid- 
den secrets of their souls, is the inexplicable 
gift of genius ; it has an eye of its own ; 
one glance and it looks the man through 
and through. He mingled frequently with 
the North Adams frequenters of the village 
tavern, but he was off on the mountain-side, 



142 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

amon[^ the lime kilns, weaving the threads 
of Ethan Brand. lie spent a year at Brook 
Farm, but spoke lightly of its socialism and of 
his own part as " chambermaid to the oxen," 
— a wasted year, but it gave us the "Blithe- 
dale Romance," which Mr. James places at the 
head of his works. He hated Socialism, but 
Puritanism, its opposite, — being spiritual and 
social individualism, — won in him no follow- 
ing save as it furnished him standing ground 
and materials for his work. Had he lived 
anywhere where conscience and law had full 
recognition and sin was possible, he would 
have written in the same strain, — as in the 
" Marble Faun," where Donatello serves his 
purpose as well as Dimmesdale. The crime 
and its ell'ect in each belong to the general 
field of ethics, where sin reveals its nature 
in soul experiences that are common to all 
men. Indeed, he has but one deep and per- 
manent interest : the play of conscience under 
sin. He is a student of the soul. He watches 
its play as a biologist watches an animal under 
varying conditions ; but in each case it is the 
study of a soul, — not degraded, but only 
wounded, as it were, and while it is keen to 
feel, and while the good and evil in it are 
full of primal energy. 



NOTES ON THE SCARLIiT LETTER H3 

Tt is HorrujtimoH wild, in Iialfway dciiofratlon 
of Hawthorne's genius, that liis talcs anj j)ar- 
abloH. Why should they not l)e so nj^arded? 
It is not easy to escape the parable, in litera- 
ture or in life. What are th(; world and hu- 
manity but parables of the Eternal Mind'/ 
The only question in literature is, are the 
paral)les w(}ll told ? If they are, the witness 
of a vast company of f^reat authors in all a^cts 
and tongues is theirs. Hawthorne was full of 
dreams, fantasi(;s, symbols, and all manner of 
spiritual necromancy, — turninj^ nature into 
spirit and spirit back into nature;, but — how- 
ever wild the })lay of his imaj^ination — the 
idea und(!rlyin^ it always has three character- 
istics : it is real, and true, and moral. Hence,' 
the " Scarlet Letter," — devoid of history and 
of probability; illusive; nature transformed to 
create and to rec(;ive meanings; personality 
sunk in ideas and ideas made personal ; so far 
away that our hearts do not reach it with 
sympathy, and it is read with unwet eyes, but 
with thoughts that lie too deep for tears ; — 
still it is one of the truest and most moral of 
books, because the human soul that lies be- 
hind it and plays through it is true to itself 
whether it does good or evil. Hawthorne 



144 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

knew evil under its laws. Neither sentiment, 
nor art, nor dogma deflected him from seeing 
the thing as it is, and setting it down with 
relentless accuracy. His claim to genius would 
be impeached if it were not accurate ; and the 
reason why it stands clear and unquestioned 
is because no taint of morbidness nor Puritan 
inheritance lessens the absolute veracity of his 
estimates. Each may have had something to 
do with the selection of his subjects, but no- 
thing whatever with his own ethical opinions. 
His literary art and execution, faultless as 
they are, would not alone secure for him the 
admiration and reverence of all lovers of good 
literature. For, at last, it is truth alone for 
which men care; and truth only is strong 
enough to win unquestioned and universal 
verdicts. 

And yet he is criticised on the score that 
the " Scarlet Letter," especially, is sad, and 
sometimes it is added that it is pessimistic. 
So are "Lear" and Balzac's "Alkahest" sad, 
but neither deserves the latter term. Nothing 
in literature is pessimistic that accurately de- 
scribes a violation of the order of the world 
and of human life, if it be in the interest of 
truth and justice. Dimmesdale and Hester 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 145 

could not escape the pangs they suffered; 
they were not going through their parts in a 
world of pessimism, but in a world of order 
which they had violated, and for which they 
were undergoing inevitable yet redemptive 
penalty. There is no pessimism so long as the 
just laws of society are working normally, — 
the very point on which Hawthorne insists, — 
however hard they are bearing on the individ- 
ual. Pessimism is an indictment of the moral 
order of the world, and is essential atheism. 
Hawthorne stood at the opposite pole. His 
main function in literature was to illustrate 
the tragical consequences of broken law when 
the law was fundamental in character or in 
society. He was almost slavishly logical, — 
putting Dimmesdale into the lowest hell of 
the Inferno and Hester in Purgatorio, where 
penalty purifies and makes the sufferer glad. 

Absolute as was his insight, and perfect as 
was his art, he has not escaped criticism. 
There is general agreement that his pages 
are overcharged with symbolism. But which 
flower will you uproot in that garden " of a 
thousand hues," though " Narcissus that still 
weeps in vain " blossom too often there ? 

Graver criticism is sometimes heard, — as 



146 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

that he has no sympathy with his characters 
in their suft'erinp^. So far as it touches the 
" Scarlet Letter " it shouhl be siiilicient refuta- 
tion to read what lie himself says in his " Eng- 
lish Note-Books," in comparin*^ Thackeray's 
" coolness in respect to his own pathos," with 
his own emotions when he read the last scene 
of the " Scarlet Letter " to his wil'e, just after 
writinj^ it, — " tried to read it rather, for my 
voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed 
up and down on an ocean as it subsides after 
a storm." 

It is not well to search an author too closely 
as to his feeling over the creatures of his im- 
agination. You may find nothing or every- 
thing, according to temperament or literary 
sense. The great author hides himself behind 
his canvas. Hawthorne, the most reticent of 
men and with the keenest sense of literary 
propriety, is the most impersonal of writers in' 
his greater works. He tells us nothing except 
what may be inferred from characteristics 
constantly recurring throughout his pages. 
Now nothing is more revealing in an author 
than his style ; it is almost a better witness 
to his character than his assertions. It is like 
the voice in conversation tliut speaks from 



NOTKS ON Til 10 SCAltLKT LETTER 147 

tlio soul nitli(!r than tho mind. Tlioro aro in 
Ilawtliorno'H stylo four invarial>lo foaturos, — 
reverence, sincerity, delicacy, and humanity; 
each is nearly ahsolute. To^rether they stand 
for heart. No matter how silently it throbs, a 
writer who puts these qualities into his pa^^os 
is to be counted as one who pities his fellow 
men even when most relentless in tracing their 
Bins. It may also be set down as a general 
principle, that truth is akin to pity as pity is 
akin to love. The great virtues do not lie far 
apart. 

The criticism is oftenest urged in connec- 
tion with Hest(ir, who is both the? centre of 
interest and of the problem. Hawthorne takes 
utmost pains to make it clear how she lived. 
Whether she was happy or not he did not 
undertake to say ; he would not raise so use- 
less a question. The tragedy is pitched at too 
high a key for happiness. Possibly there may 
be victory after slow-healing wounds, but there 
can be no amelioration by circumstance or by 
deadening of sensibility. The following pages 
from the thirteenth chapter furnish an answer 
to the question whether in her case the book 
gravitates toward despair or points to recovery 
and life. 



148 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

" Hester Prynne did not now occupy pre- 
cisely the same position in which we beheld 
her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. 
Years had come and gone. Pearl was now 
seven years old. Her mother, with the scarlet 
letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic 
embroidery, had long been a familiar object 
to the townspeople. As is apt to be the case 
when a person stands out in any prominence 
before the community, and, at the same time, 
interferes neither with public nor individual 
interests and convenience, a species of general 
regard had ultimately grown up in reference 
to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human 
nature, that, except where its selfishness is 
brought into play, it loves more readily than 
it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet pro- 
cess, will even be transformed to love, unless 
the change be impeded by a continually new 
irritation of the original feeling of hostility. 
In this matter of Hester Prynne, there was 
neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never 
battled with the public, but submitted, uncom- 
plainingly, to its worst usage ; she made no 
claim upon it, in requital for what she suf- 
fered ; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. 
Then, also, the blameless purity of her life 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 149 

during all these years in which she had been 
set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in 
her favor. With nothing now to lose, in the 
sight of mankind, and with no hope, and 
seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it 
could only be a genuine regard for virtue that 
had brought back the poor wanderer to its 
paths. 

" It was perceived, too, that while Hester 
never put forward even the humblest title 
to share in the world's privileges, — further 
than to breathe the common air, and earn daily 
bread for little Pearl and herself by the faith- 
ful labor of her hands, — she was quick to 
acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of 
man, whenever benefits were to be conferred. 
None so ready as she to give of her Httle sub- 
stance to every demand of poverty ; even 
though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back 
a gibe in requital of the food brought reg- 
ularly to his door, or the garments wrought 
for him by the fingers that could have em- 
broidered a monarch's robe. None so self- 
devoted as Hester, when pestilence stalked 
through the town. In all seasons of calamity, 
indeed, whether general or of individuals, the 
outcast of society at once found her place. 



150 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful in- 
mate, into the household that was darkened 
by trouble ; as if its gloomy twilight were a 
medium in which she was entitled to hold in- 
tercourse with her fellow-creatures. There 
glimmered the embroidered letter, with com- 
fort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token 
of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. 
It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's 
hard extremity, across the verge of time. It 
had shown him where to set his foot, while 
the light of earth was fast becoming dim, 
and ere the light of futurity could reach him. 
In such emergencies, Hester's nature showed 
itself warm and rich ; a well-spring of human 
tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, 
and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, 
with its badge of shame, was but the softer 
pillow for the head that needed one. She was 
self-ordained a Sister of Mercy ; or, we may 
rather say, the world's heavy hand had so or- 
dained her, when neither the world nor she 
looked forward to this result. The letter was 
the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness 
was found in her, — so much power to do, and 
power to sympathize, — that many people re- 
fused to interpret the scarlet A by its original 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER ICl 

signification. They said that it meant Able ; 
so stron*^ was Hester Prynne, with a woman's 
strength. 

" It was only the darkened house that could 
contain her. When sunshine came again, she 
was not there. Her shadow luid faded across 
the threshold. The helpful inmate had de- 
parted, without one backward glance to gather 
up the meed of gratitude, if any were in tlio 
hearts of those whom she had served so zeal- 
ously. Meeting them in the street, she never 
raised her head to receive their greeting. If 
they were resolute to accost her, she laid her 
finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on. 
This might be pride, but was so like humility, 
that it produced all the softening influences 
. of the latter quality on the public mind. The 
public is despotic in its temper ; it is capable 
of denying common justice, when too strenu- 
ously demanded as a right ; but quite as fre- 
quently it awards more than justice, when the 
appeal is made, as despots love to have it 
made, entirely to its generosity. Inteipreting 
Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal of 
this nature, society was inclined to show its 
former victim a more benign countenance than 
she cared to be favored with, or, perchance, 
than she deserved." 



152 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

This exquisite rehearsal of Christian service 
and temper might well win for her canoniza- 
tion. It is the picture of a saint. The very 
things that Christ made the condition of ac- 
ceptance at the last judgment she fulfilled ; 
and the graces that St. Paul declared to be 
the fruit of the Spirit were exemplified in her 
daily life. Plainly, this is not a picture of 
despair, nor even of suffering, except that 
which necessarily haunts a true soul that has 
done evil. God forbid that it should be dif- 
ferent with any of us ! Forgiveness is not 
lethean. To forget our past would defraud 
the soul of its heritage in fife. The scarlet 
letter faded out and even acquired another 
meaning. Her life came to blessed uses with 
rewards of love and gratitude from others that 
reached even unto death. The logic of this 
tender picture of a saintly life — a gospel in 
itself — must not be overlooked. Hawthorne 
certainly did not mean that the reader should 
miss the point. How could recovery from sin 
be better told, or be more complete ? When 
Peter had denied his Lord and wept bitterly 
over it, all he was told to do was to feed his 
Master's sheep. Hester's forgiveness did not 
shape itself in the form of ecstatic visions, but 



NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER 153 

of service in the spirit of Him wlio bore wit- 
ness to the truth; and by herself bearing 
■witness to it she won the reward of its free- 
dom. 

To the last touch of his pen Hawthorne 
keeps up the symbolism that both hides and 
reveals his meaning, and leaves us in such a 
mood as when, on some autumn day, we watch 
mountain and river and sky faintly shrouded 
in haze until we wonder if these and life itself 
be real, — an experience tenderly rendered by 
Longfellow in his poem on Hawthorne. He 
Hved in his dreams, but his dreams were as 
real as the earth and as true as hfe. 

Strangers in Boston still search the burial 
ground of King's Chapel for the grave of 
Hester Prynne : so true a story, they think, 
must be true in fact. If it were found they 
might ask, What does the armorial device 
mean? 

" ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES." 

Does the scarlet letter stand for sin or for 
cleansing ? Is the epitaph a word of despair 
or of hope? In what direction did Hawthorne 
intend to lead our thought ? K asked, he would 
have said. Read out of your own heart. 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 



" If admiration is not misplaced when bestowed on one who 
unites the attributes of the poet and the philosopher, it will 
not fail to be evoked by the character and genius of Horace 
Bushnell." — Professor Georgb P. Fisher, D. D., LL. D. 

" He was the Inaugurator of a movement greater than he knew, 
and he was full of impulses the significance of which even he did 
not understand. There was in him the old creative spirit, with 
the literary method as opposed to the formal, and his break with 
the past at one supreme point — atonement — and at two or three 
subordinate points was a prophecy of the coming inevitable reor- 
ganization of theology." — Rev. George A. Gordon, D. D., 
Ultimate Conceptions of Faith, p. 67. ' 

" But, — ' felt a mighty conviction of spiritual realities and 
a desire to live in them,' — tells and sums up in a word the effect 
most memorable to me that proceeded from my personal compan- 
ionship and communion with Horace Bushnell from first to last." 
— Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, Bushnell Centenary, 1902. 

" Nature is a kind of illuminated table of contents of the 
Spirit." — NovAiiis. 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 

The truest thing to be said of Horace Bush- 
nell is what Harnack said of Luther : " He 
liberated the natural life, and the natural 
order of things." 

In quoting this remark, I would emphasize 
the word natural, and the point I would make 
is, that the ultimate ground of Bushnell's 
thought, the secret and law of it, is to be 
found in his relation to nature. 

It is not necessary to raise the question 
how it happened that he was keyed to nature 
in this fundamental way and kept so true to 
its note. Or, if we attempt an answer, we may 
go to the realm of nature itself for an analogy 
if not an answer. Nature is always breaking 
out into surprises under slight changes of 
environment. The seeds of genius and great- 
ness are wide-sown, and as by a blind hand. 
Heredity grows every day more mysterious. 
We no longer inherit only the qualities of 
parents or grandsires. As true it may be that 
the marked thing in us dates a score of 



158 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

generations back. That unspeakable mystery 
named life is not diluted ; it may lie hidden 
— waiting its opportunity — until at last it 
blossoms and lets out its hidden beauty or 
power. As we think of Bushnell's birth, a 
century ago, into the sternest of the New 
England Hfe, we marvel how his mind ever 
began to unfold in free and natural ways. 
But when God calls a man for a special work 
he provides ways to make the election sure. 
First of all, he had the endowment — another 
mystery of our being — a little more from 
the open hand of the Creator, a fibre spun 
more finely, an eye with keener and broader 
vision, a heart that throbs with stronger 
beat; we call it genius. What genius will 
do, or where it will go, there is no telling. In 
Bushnell's case it drove him to nature in the 
special form of observing its laws and getting 
at its methods, and, above all, by entering 
into sympathy with these laws and methods. 
Bred in the fresh, free air of Litchfield, where 
every cloud and stream and hill spoke of na- 
ture to his brooding soul, and every day's task 
in field or shop was packed full of laws that 
struck a chord to which thought responded ; 
touched in deeper ways by every mention 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 159 

of God ; — thus bred, and charged to the 
full with all that nature could breathe into 
him, he went down to Yale, where thought 
inevitably started question, and question in- 
evitably begot doubt ; for everybody who 
thought questioned, and happy was he who 
did not doubt and deny. In short, Bushnell 
found himself in the world of theology. The 
time was over when day was bound to day 
by natural piety, and the day had come when, 
instead, he heard only disputes, and argu- 
ments, and doctrines hammered into or out 
of shape on the anvil of logic. What wonder 
that early visions of God faded out, and — 
between hard work in college and preaching 
that chiefly bred only denial — he fell away 
into a sort of numbness of soul, or, when 
roused to thought, he thought only to deny 
and reject ? 

So it was until a crisis came and action was 
forced upon him with great struggles of soul, 
when the angel of his nature came to him 
and taught him to say : " My heart wants the 
Father ; my heart wants the Son ; my heart 
wants the Holy Ghost — and one just as much 
as the other." This was not an echo from 
Schleiermacher, nor was it borne in upon him 



160 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

from the mystics. He was dealing with him- 
self in a strictly natural way ; even Scripture 
seemed not to influence him ; he was left 
alone with his own nature, and followed its 
dictate. 

This early experience is outlined in his 
^' Moral Uses of Dark Things," where he 
says : " We learn about nature by going 
directly to nature herself, putting our ear to 
her voices, observing her changes with our 
eyes." " God wants to have us go directly 
to the subjects of duty — all subjects of a 
moral and spiritual nature — and learn what 
they are from themselves. Too much report 
and talk would ruin us ; we should never know 
anything first-hand " — an incessant phrase 
with Bushnell — "if we were all the while 
obtruded upon by revelations of message and 
story. Real conviction goes before talk, and 
is grounded in the soul's own thinking of 
subjects and questions themselves." Here is 
Bushnell at the outset — himself entering the 
open door of the Kingdom of God, by steps 
pointed out through the play of his own na- 
ture as it is moved upon by the Spirit of God. 
The most marked thing in him is his fidelity 
to this habit, — continuous, inflexible, domi- 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 161 

nant, and decisive. Whatever the question or 
subject, — spiritual or material, theological 
or political, j)ersonal or civic, — he plunged 
at once into the depths of its nature, never 
staying on the surface longer than to name 
it ; and when he had found out its elements, 
its relations and action, he emerged with a 
principle, a truth, a conviction, or a method 
in his hand ready for use. So it was from 
first to last. This search, and the method of 
it, was, for the most part, conducted by him- 
self alone. " First-hand " was his watchword. 
He was criticised for over self-confidence, — 
conceit it was sometimes called. Bushnell was 
not conceited ; but he was immensely self- 
reliant and there had been begotten in him a 
tremendous sense of power, — two things then 
greatly needed. At no time in the history of 
our New England theology was there so much 
bewilderment and contradiction as when he 
came upon the stage. Far back, or down deep 
in the body of orthodoxy, there had been a 
fatal mistake over the very nature of man. 
Some sense of it was felt, and with it the 
necessity of correcting it. Hence the age of 
improvement, as it was gently termed. To 
save the churches and the faith was the one 



162 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

thought of all earnest minds. It was not 
merely a lust for theologizing — a contagious 
disease indeed — nor personal forth-putting 
that led to their various theories and distinc- 
tions. They were mending their house, not 
tearing down and building anew, and every 
man had a board, a window, or a door that he 
thought would conduce to the improvement. 
The greatness of their mistake should only 
deepen the pathos with which we look back 
upon it from to-day. Bushnell seems to have 
been the only man who measured and felt it 
as it was. He was caught between the up- 
per and nether millstones of the contending 
schools, and. was bruised, though not ground 
to powder, between them. His sympathies 
may have been more strongly with one side 
than the other, but his theology and his 
method belonged to neither. In 1851, when 
already past middle life, — stung beyond en- 
durance not only by treatment of himself, but 
by a full reahzation of the wretched condition 
into which theology had fallen, — he put out 
a volume, now rare, entitled " Christ in The- 
ology." In some respects it is the most bril- 
liant of his books. There is here no loitering 
as if loath to leave his thought, — brilliant, 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 163 

sententious, and always with a splendid sense 
of strength and vitality, a rushing torrent 
from title-page to colophon, — carrying out 
to sea a great deal of disjointed lumber, not 
to say rubbish, and leaving the up-country 
in a much healthier and more peaceful condi- 
tion. But it is also a sad book. The page in 
which this theological chaos is described is as 
true as it is graphic. It also has the value of 
showing that he had an interior knowledge 
of New England theology, and only too well 
understood to what end it was paving the 
way : " To see brought up in distinct array be- 
fore us the multitudes of leaders, and schools, 
and theologic wars of only the century past, 
— the Supralapsarians and Sublapsarians ; the 
Arminianizers and the true Calvinists ; the Pe- 
lagians and Augustinians ; the Tasters and the 
Exercisers ; Exercisers by divine ejBBciency and 
by human self -efficiency ; the love-to-being- 
in-general virtue, the willing- to-be-damned 
virtue, and the love-to-one's-greatest-happiness 
virtue ; no ability, all ability, and moral and 
natural ability distinguished ; disciples by 
the new-creating act of Omnipotence, and by 
change of the governing purpose ; atonement 
by punishment and by expression ; Hmited and 



1G4 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

general ; by imputation and without imputa- 
tion ; trinitarians of a threefold distinction, 
of three psychologic persons, or of three sets 
of attributes ; under a unity of oneness, or of 
necessary agreement, or of society and delib- 
erative council : nothing, I think, would more 
certainly disenchant us of our confidence in 
systematic orthodoxy, and the possibility in 
human language of an exact theologic science, 
than an exposition so practical and serious, 
and withal so indisputably mournful, — so 
mournfully in disputable. ' ' 

When we look back on this chaos of con- 
flicting opinions that often aspired to the dig- 
nity of doctrines, and upon the way in which 
Bushnell strove to escape from it, we are 
reminded of the legend that in the first days 
of creation some of the greater angels came 
down to earth to see what was going on, and 
returned, saying there was danger lest dear 
old chaos be overturned to make way for this 
new and dreadful idea of cosmos, and — 
worst of all — by natural law. 

As metaphysics seemed to lie at the bot- 
tom of this sweltering chaos — and certainly 
it was its vehicle — he turned fiercely upon 
it : " Metaphysics have never established any- 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 165 

thing. The last new teacher is always about 
to do it, and the coterie gathered about him 
are quite certain that he has ; but it turns 
out very shortly that he has rather multiplied 
the questions than settled any of them." 
Nothing could be truer so far as it relates to 
the multiplication of diverse doctrines. Every 
variation had been hammered out on that 
anvil. Bushnell did not speak vaguely. The 
theological schools were in his eye, and their 
students were educated on the very matter 
that bred and fed their conflicts. What won- 
der that when nurtured on stones they should 
continue to hurl them ? Bushnell revolted at 
the outset ; he was from the first dominated 
by another way of thinking. He drank from 
other fountains, and fed on other food, and 
saw with different eyes. He never approached 
a subject in the dialectic way, but always 
through the nature of the thing involved : 
What are its laws ? how is it composed ? 
what are its relations ? how does it act ? It 
was this that made him so interesting and 
often fascinating as a writer ; not that he 
gives you new facts, for sometimes he is lack- 
ing in attainable data and occasionally he 
goes astray in them, yet how charmingly he 



166 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

discourses, and how many things he points 
out that are true and are not to be found 
elsewhere ! Any good botanist can tell us 
more than we find in that most vital essay, 
" Life, or the Lives," but it takes more than 
a botanist to make us feel that " this bound- 
less wave of Life is, in some high sense, a 
wave of joy ;" and that "if you leave the 
soul out of an organized thing, all analysis of 
it is a kind of analytic murder." 

Bushnell's plain speaking led to criticism. 
From every quarter — Princeton, New Haven, 
East Windsor, Boston, and Bangor — came 
the charge of naturalism, a true and fatal 
charge if Bushnell meant by nature what his 
critics meant. It is not strange the first and 
heaviest criticism was made at this point. 
His divergence from his brethren was wide 
and radical; they differed as to the very 
nature of creation ; their worlds were not the 
same. 

But whatever was Bushnell's view of na- 
ture, and however he came by it, he did not 
go to nature for the sake of easy thinking, nor 
to escape the uncertainty of metaphysics. 
Bushnell proposed to take the deepest possi- 
ble plunge into them — even into the heart 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 167 

of nature itself — its heights as well as its 
depths. But nature is not an open page that 
he who runs may read. It is eternal and 
endless mystery. We never go far before we 
are forced to stop and say — God, and that 
only. And what are we doing to-day but ask- 
ing if we have gone far enough in any direc- 
tion to find solid ground? Robinson's great 
saying has broadened, and while we still look 
for more light to break out of God's Holy 
Word, we are also looking into that larger 
word — the Logos — the whole spoken word 
of God whose accents are ever falling on atten- 
tive ears. Here, at least, Bushnell went, finding 
— as he beheved — certainty because, as he 
contended in his very first thesis, " Nature is 
a system in which everything fulfills its end." 
Bushnell was abundantly charged with be- 
ing illogical. If by logic is meant a formal 
logic, a propositional and syllogistic logic (of 
which Jowett said that it is neither a science 
nor an art but a dodge), doubtless the charge 
was true. But this is not real logic. Logic is 
the agreement of things ; realities with other 
realities, not the agreement of words about 
them, and these words hemmed in as to their 
meaning by definition. Logic is the true re- 



168 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

cosfnition of nature. It is the recoofnition of 
the universe and all things and processes in 
it as one system. Bushnell's logic was of this 
sort, — the logic of a universal and infinite 
oneness. Thus he found his way into a valid 
theism, and escaped its fatal enemy, dualism. 
His logic and his theism form an endless chain 
that plays between nature, as we term it, and 
God. The motion is endless ; the links are 
forged by God's hand — links but not fetters, 
holding God and man together in human free- 
dom and yet in eternal necessity ; insoluble 
mystery ! but it means order and oneness ; 
anything different is chaos. 

If we were to take up Bushnell's treatises 
in order, we should find what we have called 
his secret underlying each one and the soul 
of it ; each is an appeal to nature in its great 
sense. Take his theory of language as stated 
in the introduction to " God in Christ." 
Criticism, not yet ended and often bordering 
on contempt, has been heaped upon it. Nor 
is it strange. It was like making a new 
alphabet. What wonder that men who wrote 
and taught by definition scouted it ? In no 
respect is the difference between Bushnell and 
his critics so wide as at this point. It is to 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 169 

the lasting honor of his genius that, almost 
before he had traced a Hne in the way of a 
treatise, — as if foreseeing what tasks of high 
import lay before him, — he wrought out this 
theory, the fundamental thought of which is, 
that words are but symbols or shadows or 
hints of the thinors named ; these lie behind 
the words, — spiritual realities that can only 
be suggested by names drawn from material 
things ; names that suggest but do not define 
nor compass. The Rev. E. M. Chapman has 
well described it as "a declaration against 
the tyranny of set phrase." It is indeed an 
inconvenient theory for those who imprison 
thought within words ; but for poets and 
common people and all who use language 
naturally, and for the ordinary exchange of 
thought and feeling, it is the theory that or- 
dinary people and also extraordinary people, 
like Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Tenny- 
son, will always use. In adopting it Bushnell 
did not ambush himself in order to shoot and 
escape returning shots, but simply to get into 
the natural language of the world ; nor would 
he break the bond between natural expression 
and the subtlest thought, because it possibly 
might let in uncertainty. 



170 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

We see the same thing in his " Christian 
Nurture." This great book can be looked at 
in many ways, — theological, ecclesiastical, 
civic, and domestic, — but its emphasis cer- 
tainly rests on the family ; and nowhere is 
nature so imperative and so strict in its laws 
as here. One who overlooks this misses the 
meaning: of the book. With Bushnell Chris- 
tian nurture was, from first to last, a question 
of nature. It was the unnaturalness of the 
treatment of children by the churches of the 
day that fixed his attention and called out his 
protest. Their nature was wronged, twisted 
out of shape, and inverted in all its processes. 
Instead of their angels beholding the face of 
their Father in heaven, they were children of 
wrath, with the implication of its decreed ful- 
fillment hanging over their cradles, and with 
no means of escape except through the fer- 
vors of chance revivals. The whole matter 
was a denial of human instincts in their most 
sacred relations. The horror of it was relieved 
only by its sincerity and the agony of parental 
hearts that often rebelled against it. It is an 
old saying that Calvinism breaks down when 
it comes to children, — a saying justified by 
recent changes at that point. Bushnell broke 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 171 

into this chaos of systematic theology by de- 
manding sinii)ly a natural treatment of the 
child, placing him once more in the arms of 
the Saviour, and thence back into the home 
for Christian nurture. 

Of course, by its very terms, nature is the 
main feature of " Nature and the Supernatu- 
ral." Here his central thought had full play; 
not nature in its usual restricted sense, — as 
with the naturalist who stays within its form 
and process, — but nature as comprising these, 
and going beyond into universal being, even 
God who is included in its category. Bush- 
nell could go in no other path but this. He 
could not think except as his mind ran along 
some natural channel. He could see nothing 
but law and its processes ; even the free play 
of man's mind and will and the behests of 
the Almighty were in a supra but not contra 
natural world. By this extension of nature he 
escaped necessity and found freedom as a son 
of God, and miracles became natural. " The 
being of God is a kind of law to his working," 
as he says, quoting the great Hooker. This 
book is usually regarded as the most thorough 
of his works. Exception may be taken to this 
view. There are chapters that might well be 



172 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

left out — SO far off the track are they, and 
so tinged with outworn dogma and credulous 
testimony. Taking the treatise as a whole, no- 
thing more central or more fundamental came 
from him than its main contention that nature 
and the supernatural form the one system 
of God. It is a kind of Copernican truth, em- 
bracing heaven and earth, and magnificently 
lodged in the minds of a generation that had 
not even dreamed it. However the tides of the- 
ological thought may flow, let science assert or 
deny what it must, this truth, Hke gravitation 
itself, remains unshaken and immovable. The 
ultimate dread of the theologians of the day 
was pantheism ; deism was next door to it, and 
Bushnell's naturalism was held to pave the 
way along this decensus Averni. They were 
not protesting against trifles nor " counting 
the steps of fleas," and Bushnell took special 
pains to guard against the imputation by ample 
denial and explanation. " It is not the super- 
natural submitting itself to nature to be buried 
and lost, but going down to hook itself in 
upon nature by seizing on the analogies of 
thought and law, so to become fast locked in 
aU the terms of experience and opinion which 
thought has generated. The bent we are thus 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 173 

receiving more and more distinctly towards 
nature and science is not wholly mischievous, 
as many appear to assume in their nervous 
dread of naturalism, but is our instinctive en- 
deavor to obtain a new anchorage ground for 
Christian truth and ideas, where they will hold 
us more firmly and yield us a more settled 
confidence." 

He speaks to the same effect in the essay, 
" Life, or the Lives : " — 

" Things above sense, the reverend mys- 
teries of God and religion, now throng about 
the man, firing his imagination, and challeng- 
ing a ready faith. Having passed within the 
rind of matter, and by its mechanical laws, 
and discovered there a more potent, multitu- 
dinous, self-active world of life, his higher 
affinities are wakened, drawing him away to 
the common Father, whose life is in him, as in 
them, and to those meditations of the future 
otherwise faint and dim in their evidence." 

These two passages are autobiographic as 
well as prophetic. He was himself an em- 
bodied realization of his own words, — " Na- 
ture and the Supernatural forming the one 
system of God." The entire play of his mind 
in treatise, sermon, essay, was a vindication of 



174 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

this phrase ; — himself spealdng to himself, 
revealing the secret of his own being and of 
all being. It was because he lived so pro- 
foundly in nature — finding it everywhere 
an analogon of the spirit — that he came to 
know the things of God, and God himself. It 
flows, a happy and mystic stream, through 
all his pages ; as when he writes of Niagara, 
which seemed to open his soul down to its in- 
most depths, and to show him his capacity 
" to think and feel greater things concerning 
God." 

But nowhere is Bushnell's immersion in na- 
ture so clearly seen as in his " Moral Uses of 
Dark Things." In these fascinating pages he 
lays hold of nature in its obscurities, its dis- 
eases, its dangers, its mutabilities, and, as 
Keats says:— ..^^^^^ 

Out the dark mysteries of human souls 
To clear conceiving." 

So he wrests them from the hands of pes- 
simism and forces from them their secret, and 
lo ! they are a part of the one system of God, 
and not discords, nor shadows cast from some 
city of dreadful night. 

It may seem to some that we speak of 
Bushnell as if Butler and Paley and Edwards 



THU; SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 175 

had not lived, and that there were no preach- 
ers in New England who strengthened and 
adorned their sermons by illustrations drawn 
from nature. We have not for«-otten these 
great teachers. The debt we owe to the 
Bridgewater School of divines is too great to 
be overlooked ; but it did not penetrate to the 
meaning of nature, nor did it make clear the 
relation of God to nature. He still dwelt in 
distant heavens while the works of his hand 
praised him here below. Creation had no 
unity save by a metaphysical inference. There 
was no vital relation between the facts and 
forms of nature and its truths. Bushnell, outr 
running his day, conceived of God as im- 
manent in his works — the soul and hfe of 
them. Their laws are his laws. Therefore, if 
one would know how God feels and thinks 
and acts, one must go to nature, and to hu- 
manity as its culmination. God is the spiritual 
reality of which nature is a manifestation. 
Bushnell not only saw this with absolute clear- 
ness, but he was entranced with it. It dom- 
inated him and forced his thought along its 
paths. Hence, when he came to speak of the 
Trinity his lips could utter no other word but 
manifestation. His semi-Sabellianism — a 



176 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY ... 

heresy, if it be a heresy, to which he was 
foreordained — is the inevitable corollary to an 
immanent God. If God appears from within, 
— in things or in humanity, — it must be as 
a manifestation ; God becomes man. It does 
not matter that Bushnell assents in his own 
way to the Nicene Symbol, and is accorded a 
seat in that pantheon of ancient orthodoxy. 
If he lays down a conception of God as al- 
ways " threeing " himself, which justifies the 
use of persons, it is only as he finds support- 
ing analogies in human nature, for wherever 
he goes that banner is still over him ; — and 
also because it presents God as " a being 
practically related to his creatures." But the 
threeing makes no numerical revelation of his 
interior nature, but only his power of so mani- 
festing himself. Yet, prior avowals — not an- 
tagonistic — stiU bind him. He does not for- 
feit his birthright of clear vision, nor give up 
the secret of nature which he — first of all 
about him — had seen, and subject himself to 
current interpretations of ancient formulas of 
belief ; they were well enough, but that was 
all. He was still a self-contained, independent 
thinker, who went his own way and marked 
his course by the visions of truth granted to 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 177 

him as he went along, — agreeing with others 
and with the past when he could, but under 
his own terms. 

It was the same when he came to the 
" Vicarious Sacrifice." He did not array texts 
(except to interpret them as altar-forms under 
his theory of language) ; nor did he quote 
the Fathers of the first three or the last three 
centuries, but carried his subject straight into 
" the facts and demonstrations occurring all 
the while in our human relations." And here 
he stayed until the end. For the " govern- 
mental theory " he cared but little ; and with 
the " penal or expiatory theory " he would 
have nought to do. The " moral view " was 
his view to the last. Those who regard his 
" Forgiveness and Law " as a return to either 
of those theories must have forg-otten its first 
pages, in which he says : " I recant no one of 
my denials. I still assert the moral view of 
the Atonement as before, and even more com- 
pletely than before," because he refers it to 
the " moral pronouncements of human nature 
and society." And still more clearly does he 
affirm his lifelong thought, — " We cannot 
interpret God except by what we find in our 
own personal instincts and ideas." Whether 



178 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

he advanced or strengthened the "moral 
view " of the Atonement by the second vol- 
ume may be questioned, but however that 
may be, any interpretation of it as a recanta- 
tion is to be regarded as a mistake in reading 
his own words. This second volume, taken as 
a whole, is simply a reemphasis or extension 
of the patripassianism that runs through all 
his pages. It should be said, however, that he 
finds a kind of self-wrought propitiation of 
God, but it is "natural and not forensic. If this 
takes him into the temple of ancient ortho- 
doxy, he stands in the outer court, and with 
eyes turned toward the broad fields of life 
and not to the altars of sacrifice. We would 
be explicit here. If, as Bushnell contends, 
God renders himself more placable through 
the sufferings of his Son, it is not in the in- 
terest of righteousness — expiatory or gov- 
ernmental — but of infinite, all-mastering 
love ; but, he says, " it could by no possibility 
hold any one of the forms of legal atonement 
offered by the schools." It has, however, 
made no headway as a phase of the Atone- 
ment. Thought is not moving in that direc- 
tion, but rather away from it, and is grounding 
itself more and more on the " moral view," 



THE SECRET OF HORACE BUSHNELL 179 

which accords so well with the great duties 
and capacities of humanity. 

In the same way, also, he treats the divin- 
ity of Jesus ; reversin*^ the prevalent method, 
and approaching it from the punily human or 
natural side. He says : " There is no way to 
make out his divinity so elfective and true as 
to put him down into humanity, under the 
laws of humanity, and see, from his cliildhood 
onward, whether he stays there." " Tiie closer 
we bring him down to manhood, the more 
evidently, visibly, indisj)utably divine; lie ap- 
pears." These somewhat enigmatic sentences 
remind one of the fourth of Robertson's six 
principles, — the substance of which he puts 
in a pregnant phrase : " Perfectly human, 
therefore divine." The time had come when 
such a word must be spoken. Each came to it 
in his own way : Robertson through the Ger- 
mans ; Bushnell along the path of his own in- 
sight. Unconsciously, he put himself in accord 
with the highest form of evolutionary phi- 
losophy ; as Browning states it in " Paracel- 
sus : " — 

" All tended to mankind, 
And, man produced, all has its end thus far ; 
But in completed man begins anew 
A tendency to God." 



180 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

The unity o£ nature thus fulfills itself : come 
from God in its remotest forms, it finds its way 
back to man, and through perfect man to God 
from whom he eame. Every stage is natural 
and also- supernatural, and thus forms one 
system. If Bushnell did not work this out 
c(mipletely to its inevitable conclusion, he 
was always hovering' near it. Indeed, it must 
be said of him that he was a theologian of 
beginnings ; he completed nothing. lie at- 
tempted to finish by thouglit what could not 
yet be achieved ; by light, but the full day had 
not dawned. Each of his great contentions is 
essentially true ; but each requires what could 
not be given in his own nor in any previous 
day. " Christian Murture " and the early chap- 
ters of the " Vicarious Sacrifice " come neai"- 
est to being exceptions. But theology to-day 
calls for all latest knowledge to fill it out as 
a science ; — psychology, ethnology, language, 
the physical sciences, civics, and, above all, his- 
tory, not only as annals but as the inner life 
of the nations, — this knowledge Bushnell had 
only in part, but he wonderfully, if not fidly, 
forestalled it by his own observing eye and 
penetrating mind, and by his passionate sense 
of the unity of God, and its corollary of God 



TIIK SKCKl'/r OK IIOKACK IWISIIN IH.I. IHl 

and n.ituni as formiii};- ono HyKicnii. Drlvtiii l>y 
liis own nuiiiro liil.o ii;il.iir(!, — .'iin()ii<j;' licr Ijiwh 
and ]>r()(M'.sH(iS iind inl,(iIli<i;(>nc()H, — lid (inds 
liiniHdir in dod. Tlio ^iHiut WMMCit in rovduliid. 
Not in iho lio;iv(!nH ubovo nor in ili(i (l()j)l,liH 
Ixdow, \)ul itwvuuui) williin, — wil.liin onr own 
minds and lioiiits ; wiiiiin (lio sood and witliin 
tli(MUMil,i'(5 of tlio s(!(!(l, ovonnoro within is (lod 
to Ix) i'onnd. Huslin(dl did not tra(!() to tlio 
end tln5 oni,woiI<n»<»' of liis own H(!(M(it as it 
evolved itsi^II" ni his thou}j;ht and ('X|H'ii('n(Mi ; 
nor will tiio mysteries IocI^imI within tho <;re- 
at(!d nnivcM'so and in tho sonl oi' man, whi(di 
Ih a |»a,rt of it, over <!(!as() to nnlold tluitn- 
solves. TIhm'o is not another nnivcusi^ that 
drops its ni(!Hsat>^o or its laws down into this, 
as from soiM(i outward world. All that is, or 
can 1)0 for ns, is this ord(!r in which wc have 
our hein^, — nature and the sujuirnatural, — 
one Hystem of God who is in it in all the phui- 
itude ol' his Ix^ino- | ouu Hystcin in which 
things are analogous ol" tho spnit, and all are 
the 1jo«»;os of (jod. Ituslnndl did not wholly 
attain ; who has ev<!r attained, or will ? IJiit 
h(! uiovcmI mightily in tlu^ri^^ht din^ction, — 
with ^rc^at splendor of sj)(!0(di, with a, ^(tniufl 
that illumined ovary Huhject he touched, with 



182 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

a fervor and sincerity that raised a great 
mind into a great spiritual force which still 
inspires the souls of men, and moves them to 
name him as a true interpreter of the divine 
secret of nature, having first made it his own. 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 



" There is something sacramental in perfect metre and rhythm. 
They are outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual 
grace, namely, of the self-possessed and victorious temper of one 
who has so far subdued nature as to be able to hear that uni- 
versal sphere-music of hers, speaking of which Mr. Carlyle says 
that ' all deepest thoughts instinctively vent themselves in song.' " 
— Charles Kingsley. 

" I can easily persuade myself, that, if the world were free, — 
free, I mean, of themselves, — brought up, all, out of work into 
the pure inspiration of truth and charity, new forms of personal 
and intellectual beauty would appear, and society itself reveal the 
Orphic movement. No more will it be imagined that poetry 
and rhythm are accidents or figments of the race, one side of all 
ingredient or ground in nature. But we shall know that poetry is 
the real and true state of man, the proper and last ideal of souls, 
the free beauty they long for, and the rhythmic flow of that uni- 
versal play in which all life would live." — HoKACE Bushnell, 
D. D., Work and Play, p. 42. 

"All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally 
utter themselves in song. The meaning of song goes deep. Poetiy, 
therefore, we will call musical thought. See deep enough, and 
you see musically ; the heart of Nature being everywhere music 
if you can only reach it." — Thomas Caklyle. 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON 
MUSIC 

It was a remark of Mendelssohn that there 
are two subjects which are too sacred for dis- 
cussion, — religion and thorough-bass. 

Rehgion and music are not only alike 
sacred, but they touch at so many points that 
they can hardly be separated, and in their 
higher ranges they melt into one. There are 
debased forms of music that have no sugges- 
tion t)f rehgion, and there are debased reli- 
gions that do not call for music ; but when 
worthy of their name they pass into each other 
as by creative af&nity. 

I hope I shall do no wrong to the memory 
of the great composer, who was himself a fine 
illustration of the blending of the two, if I 
discuss them somewhat, for the purpose of 
showing not simply that music is helpful to 
rehgion, but that there is a scientific reality 
in those phrases, usually regarded as poetical, 
which speak of music as divine and as an ex- 
ponent of the spiritual world ; in other words, 



186 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

that music is literally, as Collins iiamecl it, a 
" Heavenly Maid." 

The first tiling that strikes one Avho reflects 
on music is its uiii(|ueness ; it is like noiliino' 
else that men do. If a visitor from a song- 
less planet were to come to earth, nothino- 
would amaze him more than the use of the 
voice in sin<>in<^. He could put other things 
together with more or less of understanding, 
hut music would he a hopeless puzzle. It lies 
so close and is so wrought into us that we are 
})lind to the wonder of it. BroAvning has finely 
touched this point in his "Aht Vogler : " — 

" And I know not if, savo in this, sucli gift be allowed to 

man, 
That ont of throe sounds he frame, not a fonrth sound, but 

a star. 
Consider it well : each tone of our scale in itself is nought; 
It is overywhei'o in the world — loud, 8«ft, and all is said : 
Give it to me to use I I mix it with two in my thought : 
And, there I Ye have heard and seen : consider and bow 

the head ! " 

Let us turn into a church on a Sunday 
morning. The service will consist of prayers, 
readings, a sermon, and something very dif- 
ferent from these, called the 7m(nic. It is not 
like the sermon, which is an appeal to 
thought ; it does not ask anything, as do the 



A LAYMAN'S KIOKLKCTIONS ON MUSIC 1H7 

prayers ; It dociH not dciolaro uriytliinj;', as do 
ilio losKoiiK from tlio JJible ; it may iiko words, 
but does not depend upon them ; it may suj^- 
fTcjst, but does not insist on tlion^Iit. Tlio 
eontrast is still <j;reat(!r in tlie nu^tliod of ox- 
pression. Tlie ordinary use of the voice is set 
aside for a peculiar um ol' it, — almost as if 
tluire were two voices in one j)erson, s[if^^(5st- 
in<»" a dual bein^. Instead ol' the convcsrsa- 
tional voice, which is without rcigard to pitch 
or time or harmony, the organs of sjxicch 
are brought under the a(;tion ol' the will, 
which dir(!cts tluim to speak in a C(!rtain man- 
ncsr that is ii;^idly (hiterniincd by (Uirtain laws 
pertaininj*' to the air in its relation to the 
organs. There may be no absolute diU'erence 
between the speaking aiid the; singing voice 
in pronouncing,. a single syllable, but when it 
is sung there is a distinct act of the will, by 
which pitch is giv(;n and preserved, and if 
sung in concert, harrrjony also is pres(!rved. 
I^he fundamental act in conversation is 
thought ; in singing it is an act of the will. 
The voice, obeying a certain conc(;ption which 
has b(;en passed over to the will, strikes a 
certain key or note, which it kecj)s in mind, 
and repeats at intervals. How it is able to 



188 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

repeat this note is an absolute mystery. We 
only know that, directed by some conception 
within, the voice is able to produce a certain 
vibration of the air which always yields the 
same sound. This vibration is rapid beyond 
conception, yet the exact number can be re- 
produced time after time, not only by one 
voice, but by a multitude of voices. All 
things are perhaps equally wonderful when 
looked at closely, but in some cases the mys- 
tery is more apparent and striking than in 
others. What is more wonderful than that 
the human voice by a conscious act can du- 
plicate a sound that is what it is by virtue 
of an almost infinitely rapid vibration of the 
air ? There is no explanation of it except on 
the theory that there is something corre- 
spondingly infinite in the mind that does it. 
As it is a matter of the highest mathematics, 
it must be that the mind is the mathematician 
that masters the problem, so that every sing- 
ing child is an unconscious Helmholtz, and 
even more, since it does by nature what he 
has only described. 

But let us go back to the church. Four or 
more singers begin this wonderful use of the 
voice. They strike a key, from which they 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 189 

make a certain departure, hij^her or lower, 
but are held by the key, as birds rui<^ht fly 
when held by a cord. The parts also vary, 
departin<^ from the fundamental note, but al- 
ways within certain limits. They have no 
liberty of range, except as it is determined 
by unalterable laws ; though, as Milton says, 
" some musicians are wont skillfully to fall" 
out of one key into another without breach 
of harmony." Under such inflexible restric- 
tions the choir begin to sing, as it is called. 
Every note is determined by law ; the rela- 
tion of the parts to one another and to the 
key is a matter which, if examined, resolves 
itself into mathematics. The singers are sim- 
ply starting the air about them into certain 
regular periodic vibrations, which they are 
able to measure and to reproduce by some 
faculty which we call ear. The whole opera- 
tion is fundamentally mathematical, and is 
conducted under laws to which the singers 
are able to render exact obedience. 

But how do they use these laws ? By com- 
bining the sounds in a certain way, — slow 
or rapid, high or low, in one combination or 
another, — they arouse certain emotions in 
the minds of the hearers, which may be 



190 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

deepened in several ways, as by exactness of 
time, by accuracy of harmony, by modula- 
tion, by purity and volume of tone, but 
chiefly by a personal something which the 
sin2:ers throw into their voices. We call it 
feeling or soul or expression, — words that 
conceal our ignorance, yet name an undoubted 
reality. That one singer can put into certain 
notes or vibrations of air an emotion which is 
felt by those who listen, such as another can- 
not, is the marvel of marvels. The notes, the 
vibrations of air, the time, the harmony, the 
accuracy of rendering, are alike, but one in- 
duces a feeling which the other does not. 
Music, when viewed scientifically, is not very 
abstruse ; it is more nearly within reach than 
light or electricity or chemical affinity. It is 
largely a matter of atmospheric vibration 
and rhythm. The air is an easy subject of 
examination ; its action is readily determined 
by experiment ; and rhythm, or accentuated 
time, is a simple matter. The strange thing 
is that when we have brought the whole 
operation, whether it comes from the voice or 
the organ or the orchestra, within the com- 
pass of science, and put every part of it un- 
der its law, so that we have the entire process 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 191 

set down in its equivalents, we have not 
touched the essential nature of it. So far it 
is a matter of mathematics, — air set to 
quicker or slower vibration, in greater or less 
volume, with a narrow play of time accentua- 
tion. 

But we have not come to church for this. 
It does not explain why, when the organ 
prelude sends out its first soft notes, hardly 
heard, mere breathings of sound, then gently 
passes on to others that die away, or, acquir- 
ing force, grow strong and confident and 
swell into loudness, and at last call in other 
notes as allies, and so move on till the instru- 
ment leaps an octave higher, calling in still 
other sounds, and, finally dropping to lower 
tones, adds strength to gentleness, — this does 
not explain why with these sounds a great 
change comes over us ; why care and weari- 
ness slowly dissolve, and peace and rest take 
their place ; nor why our mood and thought 
change under the changing tones, growing 
calmer and stronger as the instrument sends 
out louder, more complex, and firmer tones, 
until at last it has subdued us unto its own 
apparent temper. No analysis of music ex- 
plains why it excites emotion or thought 



192 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

within us. And yet we are forced to the 
conclusion that in some way the emotion or 
thought is closely bound up with these same 
mathematical formulas, and even that they 
have a necessary or organic relation. The 
vibration of air and the emotion are not arbi- 
trary associates, but run back into some com- 
mon unity in which they both exist ; and it 
must be that it is in that underlying unity, 
in that meeting-ground of mathematical law 
and human emotion, that the explanation of 
the power of one over the other is to be 
found. Or, in plainer language, these laws of 
atmospheric vibration and rhythm and to- 
nality, when properly used, take us into a 
world of real cause ; for the sake of a name, 
let us call it the world of the spirit. 

If these facts indicate a substantial unity 
of creation, let us not hold back. It is only 
by recognizing such unity that we reach a 
real or spiritual basis of things. We do not 
thus merge all things in the material creation, 
but we rather carry material things back into 
the spiritual world. Music is not a matter of 
atmospheric vibration, rhythm, and harmony, 
but is a spiritual thing having them as its 
body. 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 193 
Let US play a little with our thought, and 
as, when the organist suffers his fingers to 
wander over the keys, he sometimes strikes 
out a melody, so we perhaps may hit upon 
truth worth heeding. Creation finally is in- 
explicable, but it is weU to have some work- 
ing hypothetical conception of it. The most 
satisfactory conception is that it proceeds 
trom an eternal and spiritual world under 
fixed laws. Creation rests upon this spiritual 
world, but is shut off from it; it is itself 
the barrier, and at the same time it is an ex- 
pression of this world. It is the world of 
order, of truth, of love, of joy, of reality. 
The secret of fife is to break through the 
barrier of created things, or rather to use it 
as a pathway, into the world of spiritual 
reality. We came forth from it, we shall re- 
turn into It; meanwhile the main business of 
humanity is to keep up communication with 
It, to take shape under it, and to partake of 
Its eternal life. If we ask why we are drawn 
out from the world of the spirit into a finite 
creation and returned to it, we ask the for- 
ever unanswerable question. Personal exist- 
ence is a mystery that eternity itself may 
not solve; but that we live and have our 



194 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

being in a spiritual order is a truth which is 
the necessary and final outcome of all thought. 
Unless we beheve this, there is not much 
occasion for believing anything ; and conduct 
has little worth or dignity except as it pro- 
ceeds from such a belief. Life depends upon 
maintaining proper relations to environment ; 
but man has a twofold environment, a ma- 
terial and a spiritual. While he must adjust 
himself to each, he uses one in order to reach 
the other, where alone he finds the end of life. 
The plea of pessimism, the puzzle in philo- 
sophy, the stumbling-block in social science, 
the uncertain element in all thought, the ir- 
reducible factor in every human problem, — 
all spring out of the fact that we exceed our 
material environment, we outmeasure the 
material world in which we find ourselves. 
Hence we predicate another world, not a fu- 
ture one alone, but a world present, eternal, 
spiritual, out of which we come, to which we 
return, and in which we exist. The one pur- 
pose of life is to find paths into this world, 
or to make paths if there are none. One of 
the broadest is music. It is the commonest 
way of escape from " this muddy vesture of 
decay," — one that religion always keej)s 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 195 

open, and one that poetry and thought have 
ever trodden with delight. 

It is a suggestive fact that the great 
thinkers in all ages speak for the most part 
alike on music, and agree in assigning to it 
the special function to which I refer. No 
one has written more profoundly upon it 
than Schopenhauer. Wagner regarded him 
as the first philosopher who assigned to music 
its true place and function. It may seem 
strange that the philosopher of despair should 
find a theme in a thing so essentially joyous. 
It is because his philosophy, whether true or 
not, plays about the foundations of things, 
and so finds itself a near neighbor to the pro- 
foundest of the arts. The Greeks put all 
knowledge within music ; the Nine are Muses, 
and their dance and hymn and art are the 
play of the world ; but philosophy carries it 
a step farther, and makes it the sign of the 
elemental laws of creation. It is not neces- 
sary to agree with Schopenhauer in his con- 
ception of the world as simply blind will in 
perpetual struggle with desire, destroying all 
things in its path that it may come into con- 
sciousness, thus turning existence into misery, 
— resistless will, interminable desire ; one 



196 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

crushing the other and cutting it short as it 
presses toward its goal, — a theory that illus- 
trates many aspects of the world, but leaves 
its origin unexplained, and deprives its order 
of reason, for where there is order there must 
be reason, and where there is reason and 
order there must be consciousness. It is not 
necessary to believe this theory in order to 
agree with Schopenhauer that the present or- 
der of the world is one from which we are to 
escape, though we might wish to modify it by 
saying that this world is to be used as a path- 
way to a higher. He holds that in the con- 
templation of any art we are divested of our 
surroundings and behold the " real essence of 
things," and so we are in a region of peace ; 
we emerge from the world where will is for- 
ever striving to gratify desire, and come into 
the real and eternal world of rest. In this 
he is quite right, namely, that there is an 
escape from a transient and reposeless world ; 
but the satisfaction comes, not from getting 
out of the sphere of the play of will, but 
rather by getting into the very heart of the 
will ; or, if we adopt Schopenhauer's idea of 
it, by getting into the centre of the whirling 
storm, where there is no motion. In simpler 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 197 

words, rest is found by passing into a world 
where there is perfect obedience to certain 
fundamental laws of human life, such as love, 
sympathy, and reverence. Schopenhauer would 
escape will by the ministration of art which 
momentarily diverts us from the conflict of 
will and desire. Instead, we thus come into a 
world where there is full obedience to will, 
where will and desire become commensm-ate 
through perfect and spontaneous obedience. 
This is specially a function of the art of 
music, which has for its most imperative con- 
dition obedience. While accepting Schopen- 
hauer's main thought, we reverse his appKca- 
tion of it, and escape its dreary conclusions. 
He is partly correct in his conception of the 
world as something from which we need de- 
liverance, and of music as one of the means ; 
but he is wrong in ascribing the misery of 
the world to will, and escape from it as the 
way to rest ; it is escaped only as we become 
one with will through obedience. He is again 
right in making will fundamental; it is the 
ultimate fact, that in which and by which all 
things exist. Religiously God is love ; meta- 
physically God is will. Hence the first func- 
tion and duty of creation is obedience ; it is 



198 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

the one thing that man or beast or tree or 
rock has to do. To obey is to fulfill creation ; 
to obey perfectly is to come into oneness or 
harmony with all things, and in this harmony 
rest and peace are found. Creation reahzes 
itself in perfect obedience to the laws of the 
eternal will. Then the spheres make music, 
and the " smallest orb like an angel sings." 

Shakespeare, who never misses the heart of 
whatever he touches, says : — 

" Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. " 

These Hues have the exactness of definition. 
The harmony of the universe is in our immor- 
tal souls, but it cannot be heard through the 
vesture of the body. The same thought ap- 
pears in Hooker's " Ecclesiastical Polity : " 
" Touching musical harmony, . . . such is the 
force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath 
in that very part of man that is most divine, 
that some have been thereby induced to think 
that the soul itself, by nature is, or hath in 
it, harmony." Shakespeare and Addison and 
many another poet caught with unerring in- 
stinct at the Pythagorean idea of the music 
of the spheres, which is by no means a fancy, 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 199 

but a bit of solid philosophy. Schopenhauer, 
with cold, hard meaning, says that " the world 
might be called embodied music," and that 
" were we able to give a perfect and satis- 
factory explanation of music, we should also 
have a true philosophy of the world." Turn 
this about and it is even truer. If we could 
get at a perfect and satisfactory explanation 
of the world we should find it to be harmony, 
and that music would be its best exponent. 
The delight we find in music springs from the 
fact that we share in the harmony of creation, 
and have in some feeble degree reproduced it ; 
and the measure of our delight is in exact 
proportion to the obedience to the laws in- 
volved, supplemented by the human feeling 
thrown into the expression, which may corre- 
spond to the feeling which God has put into 
his works. 

If this discourse upon the metaphysics of 
the subject has not failed of its purpose, it 
has shown us that music is one of the paths 
by which we escape from the unrest of time 
and enter into the peace of eternity. I con- 
tend that this is what actually happens when 
we come under the power of true music. We 
are carried over into the world of the spirit. 



200 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

the world of reality, the enduring and perma- 
nent world ; we feel its power, its repose, its 
satisfaction, because we are in the presence 
of obedience and harmony and sympathy, — 
things to which we are correlated in our 
higher nature. I do not care to assert that 
such an experience is religious, although it 
deals with the elements of religion, and enters 
its very temple. Music is the stuff of which 
religion is made. What is religion but rev- 
erence, obedience, love, and sympathy; and 
what is music but these, — expressions of what 
is wrought into the fabric of creation and so 
finds an echo in our hearts ? Religion is the 
personal adoption of what music means. 

The difficulty in any discussion of this sort 
is to persuade one's readers that one is not 
indulging in mere sentiment and fancy. I am 
willing to be accused of mysticism when I 
say with Schopenhauer that " the world is 
embodied music," but I refuse to admit that 
it is fancy or mere sentiment ; and when I as- 
sert that music is the type and expression of 
the eternal world I would be understood as 
speaking with as much exactness as if I were 
dealing with weights and measures. It would 
put us on the track of this truth to consider 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 201 

the real meaning of the words that are con- 
stantly used in respect to music. They had 
their origin in clear and profound concep- 
tions ; and the fact that they originated with 
poets and philosophers but confirms their 
truthfulness. There is no better way of get- 
ting at the secret of music than to find out 
what the great thinkers meant by their use of 
certain terms that have been universally ac- 
cepted. Philosophers and poets, from Pytha- 
goras and Plato down, say in their own way 
the same thing, and each pass into the domain 
of the other ; the poets speculate and the 
philosophers sing. 

Plato in the '^ Republic " cautions us against 
an excessive use of music, especially of " sweet 
and soft and melancholy airs," lest the char- 
acter become weak and irritable, — a wise cau- 
tion, for music is Promethean fire which burns 
to consume unless handled carefully. It is 
never safe except as it is combined with severe 
studies, or is studied severely, not because it 
is a weak or weakening thing, but because it 
is so spiritual and so unworldly. In the same 
dialogue he says that " musical training is a 
more potent instrument than any other, be- 
cause rhythm and harmony find their way into 



202 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

the secret places of the soul, on which they 
mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making 
the soul graceful ; and also because he who 
has received this true education of the inner 
being will most shrewdly perceive omissions 
or faults in art or nature, and will receive into 
his soul the good, and become noble and good, 
and hate the bad even before he is able to 
know the reason why." And again he says 
in '^ Laches : " " When I hear a man discours- 
ing of virtue who is a true man, and worthy 
of his theme, I deem such an one to be the 
true musician." Plato was a superior musical 
critic, and he rigidly excluded certain kinds 
as weakening and debasing, but insisted on 
what he called certain "harmonies." " Leave," 
he says, " the strain of necessity and the 
strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortu- 
nate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain 
of courage and the strain of temperance." 
That is, the harmonies are the expressions of 
these virtues, which are real things. 

In this glance at music it may have occurred 
to our readers that the most effective refer- 
ences have taken us back into regions of time 
when there was no music in the modern sense 
of the word. What is named great music dates 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 203 

since the seventeenth century. The music that 
Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne and Dry- 
den and Collins heard bears slight relation to 
their expression of it if judged by modern 
standards; and yet no one since has written 
so truly and passionately of what they had as 
these great authors. In explanation, it may 
be that the real power of music lies in its ele- 
ments and not in its combinations or artistic 
forms. There was poetry — real and full — 
before poetry was written. Never was there 
more faultless verse than to-day, but there is 
not now living a great poet using the English 
tongue. Given such poets as those named, they 
will take the elements of music, and, in an in- 
stinctive way, hear them in their most moving 
forms ; — as Collins says in his memorable 
Ode: — 

" Thy humblest reed could more prevail, 
Had more of strength, diviner rage. 
Than all which charms this laggard age." 

It is the province of genius to lend itself to 
what is intrinsically great and give it expres- 
sion. The music of the early day awakened 
rhapsody because it was heard by souls capa- 
ble of rhapsody. 

Let us now listen to one who goes deeper, — 



204 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

Amiel, poet, critic, philosopher, the Pascal of 
the nineteenth century. In that remarkable 
book, the "Journal Intime," he says: "This 
morning the music of a brass band which had 
stopped under my window moved me almost 
to tears. It exercised an indefinable nostalgic 
power over me; it set me dreaming of another 
world, of infinite passion and supreme happi- 
ness. Such impressions are the echoes of Par- 
adise in the soul ; memories of ideal spheres, 
whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates 
the heart. Plato ! Pythagoras ! ages ago 
you heard these harmonies, surprised these 
moments of inward ecstasy, knew these divine 
transports. If music thus carries us to heaven, 
it is because music is harmony, harmony is 
perfection, perfection is our dream, and our 
dream is heaven." I cannot let these passion- 
ate words pass without calling attention to 
the solidity of the thought in them. Amiel 
was poetical and sensitive to the last degree, 
but he was at bottom a philosophical critic 
and a profound thinker. Starting with a feel- 
ing or sentiment, he lapses immediately into 
thought, and with clear vision pierces to the 
depths of the subject before him ; and what- 
ever he says has the hardness and weight of 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 205 

severe argument. When he speaks of music 
as carrying us to heaven, he means to state 
a definite process ; and when he indicates the 
steps, — harmony, perfection, the fulfillment 
of perfection, heaven, — he intends to make 
the assertion that music carries us into the 
world where these things are felt. He goes 
even deeper in another passage : " Harmony 
is the expression of right, order, law, and 
truth; it is greater than time and represents 
eternity." 

Amiel was one of the freest thinkers in his 
free-thinking century. Church, creed, school, 
nationality, had httle weight of prejudice with 
him ; he was simply a voice echoing his thought, 
and his thought was what his own eye and 
soul revealed to him. When he speaks of 
music taking him into heaven, he means it to 
the full; and when he identifies music with 
right, order, law, and truth, he speaks as 
closely as does a chemist over his compounded 
gases. 

No one has touched the secret of music 
more closely than Charles Kingsley. " Music," 
he says, " goes on certain laws and rules. Man 
did not make the laws of music ; he has only 
found them out, and if he be self-willed and 



206 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

break them there is an end of music instantly. 
Music is a pattern and type of heaven, and 
of the everlasting life of God which perfect 
spirits live in heaven — a life of melody and 
order in themselves ; a life in harmony with 
each other and with God." This goes down 
to the bottom of the subject ; music is that 
obedience to law which secures order, har- 
mony, oneness, and sympathy, the realization 
of which is heaven. Kingsley does not here 
speak as a preacher so much as a student of 
natural science. The point at which the har- 
monies of the external world touch the corre- 
sponding moral chords of our inner nature is 
a mystery ; it is a part of the greater question 
of the relation of sensation to consciousness. 
We only know that harmonies of sound touch 
the mind and suggest a moral harmony. So 
true is this that all these masters of thought 
whom I am quoting do not hesitate to name 
the result as heaven, by which they do not 
mean any place, nor any fulfillment of earthly 
expectation, nor any here nor there, but a 
moral condition which is the outcome of obe- 
dience to law. 

Schopenhauer, as he emerges from the met- 
aphysics of the subject, speaks of " the un- 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 207 

speakable fervor or inwardness of all music, 
by virtue of which it brings before us so near 
and yet so remote a paradise," and attributes 
it to " the quickening of our innermost na- 
ture." And again, when describing a certain 
kind of music, he says it " bespeaks a noble, 
magnanimous striving after a far-off goal, 
the fulfillment of which is eternal." Again, 
" Good music tells us what we are, or what 
we might be." 

Quotation to the same effect might be made 
without end, but I will go no farther in this 
direction than to recall the famous words of 
which De Quincey says : " With the exception 
of the fine extravaganza on that subject in 
* Twelfth Night,' I do not recollect more than 
one thing said adequately on the subject of 
music in all literature ; it is a passage in the 
' Religio Medici ' of Sir Thomas Browne, and, 
though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, 
has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it 
points to the true theory of musical effects." 
The passage is as follows : — 

" There is music wherever there is a har- 
mony, order, or proportion ; and thus far we 
may maintain the music of the spheres, for 
those well-ordered motions and regular paces, 



208 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

though they give no sound to the ear, yet to 
the understanding they strike a note most full 
of harmony. Whatever is harmonically com- 
posed delights in harmony ; which makes me 
much distrust the symmetry of those heads 
which disclaim against our church music. For 
myself, not only for my Catholic obedience, 
but my particular genius, I am obliged to 
maintain it, for even that vulgar and tavern 
music which makes one man merry, another 
mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a 
profound contemplation of my Maker ; there 
is something in it of divinity more than the 
ear discovers." 

I pause in the quotation to remark that Sir 
Thomas here touches a common experience, 
namely, that music, poor as such, and designed 
for simple ends, will often arouse the purest 
and loftiest emotions. I take it that it is 
largely because the harmony is produced in 
the midst of material and moral discord, and 
that under such conditions it unlocks the 
heart down to its inmost recesses, and calls 
up that which is most remote from and most 
unlike the present. 

A striking illustration of this experience 
is to be found in Dr. Bushuell's discourse on 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 209 

" Religious Music " in " Work and Play." 
Shall I ever forget hearing it in the dimly 
lighted and dingy old chapel of Yale College ! 
The voice and cadences more musical than the 
organ that was being dedicated, the swing of 
the sentences as regular as the movement of 
an orchestra, and as true to the keynote ; the 
argument varied, yet as sustained and har- 
monious as a symphony, its steady march 
broken at times by dashes of melody like that 
to which I refer. It is a description of the 
effect upon himself of mere shouting and 
echoes heard in the high Alps. The rhetoric 
of the passage has gone out of fashion, but is 
to be remembered along with Jeremy Taylor 
and Sir Thomas Browne, with prayers that it 
may come back again when one appears who 
is fit to use it. We forgot the instrument 
which was the occasion of the words, satisfied 
with the rhythmic flow of the sentences as 
they fell from his lips. This notable passage, 
in its rhythmic and melodic character, is an 
accurate illustration of a profound remark by 
Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, that "every man 
has a rhythm in his walk, gesture, voice, mod- 
ulation, and sentences, — a rhythm which is 
the natural expression of the man when all the 



210 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

elements of his nature come into harmony, 
and the inner and the outward, the sj)iritual 
and the physical, flow together in perfect 
unison ; " for seldom has there been a man 
who was so set to music in his whole nature 
as was this great doctor of theology. But the 
point suggested by Sir Thomas Browne's words 
in regard to " tavern music " is that the effect 
of music is not commensurate with its cause, 
the simplest often awakening the deepest 
emotions. There are, of course, reasons for 
this, which may at least be guessed. Is it the 
chords or the melody, the harmony or the 
sentiment, that moves one most deeply ? The 
melody interests us most, arouses the human 
part of us — tears or vows ; but is it not the 
harmony, or even one clear, pure tone, that 
awakens the religious sense, and unveils eter- 
nity ? It is, I take it, these chance harmonies 
or tones of unusual quality, sometimes heard 
in the simplest music, or even in the wind as 
it touches the boughs of trees, that so move 
us. It is true that much depends upon the 
hearer ; that, filled as the world is with all the 
elements and conditions of music, the heart of 
man is set to it all because he comprises all in 
himself, and one note or chord from without 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 211 

will often start all the human strings into 
vibration. 

But I will go on with the quotation from 
Sir Thomas Browne : — 

" It [music] is an hieroglyphical and shad- 
owed lesson of the whole world and creatures 
of God, such a melody to the ear, as the whole 
world, well understood, would afford the un- 
derstanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of 
that harmony which intellectually sounds in 
the ears of God ; it unties the ligaments of 
my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out 
of myself, and by degrees, methinks, resolves 
me into heaven." 

Sir Thomas Browne loves to round his sen- 
tences, and he does it superbly ; but if this 
were his only excellence he would not be read 
as he has been for two hundred and fifty 
years. He well supports the title of philoso- 
pher. His conception of music as " an hiero- 
glyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole 
world " is one of those thoughts which have 
always haunted great minds. It was felt by 
that father of the Church who said : " The 
heathen use a pipe or a flute for music, but 
the instrument of our God is the universe." 

Music most discloses its spiritual power in 



212 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

its indirect effects. It is when it makes itself 
a servant that it becomes most heavenly. 
Thoughtful men, and those whose vocation it 
is to think, understand this well, and often 
put themselves in contact with music, — es- 
pecially the orchestra, where the harmonies 
are many and full, — not in order to listen to 
it, but to be affected by it. They do not listen 
in the sense of following and noting it, but 
they let it " creep into their ears " and start 
them into thought on other themes. The soul 
and grace of many intellectual compositions 
have been drawn from music hardly heard, 
but inly felt. Beethoven says : " Music opens 
a portal to an intellectual world ready to en- 
compass us, but which we may never encom- 
pass." It makes the mind intuitive ; it sug- 
gests the larger and nobler view ; it discloses 
the relations of truths and spreads them out, 
and especially it unites and harmonizes them. 
This is its office. It is not an end in itself ; it 
is not an art for art's sake. Its office is not to 
tickle the ear with transient harmonies, but to 
reveal and to disclose eternal truths and real- 
ities. In a literal sense it brings all heaven 
before our eye ; it is the language of eternity ; 
it is both the witness of a spiritual world and 



A LAYMAN'S REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC 213 

the way into it — a door through which we 
pass to find ourselves in the midst oi' eternal 
things, — truth, purity, obedience, love, adora- 
tion, — the realities that compose life and are 
symbolically wrought into the rhythm and 
harmony of the world. 



A COCK TO ^SCULAPIUS 



" The secret of Jesua was the unswerving', uncompromising, 
practical idealism with which he faced the evils of life and the 
darkness of death, and refused to regard them as other than 
weapons in the hand of an omnipotent goodness which, in spite 
of them, and through them, is irresistibly realizing its divine 
purpose." — Edward Caikd, LL. D., Evolution of Religion, ii. 
p. 88. 

" All our better moods are prophetic of eternity for us. Justice 
feels itself rooted more deeply than the mountains are ; it is of 
the very essence of love to be consciously everlasting ; and faith 
feels as though it could die death after death, and only be the 
nigher God with every change." — William Mountford. 

" The truth of the life to come will be verified in the same 
way; as Aristotle tells us, we must practice immortality. We 
have theorized about it, argued about it, hunted the universe 
over for proofs of it, sought it, alas I in many incantations and 
juggleries ; suppose we stop speculating about the immortal 
life, and begin to practice it. That is not a mystical injunction. 
Live it, and it will prove itself." — Rev. Washington Gladden, 
LL. D., The Practice of Immortality, p. 26. 



A COCK TO .ESCULAPIUS 

What Socrates meant in saying to Crito, 
^^ I owe a cock to iEsculapius ; will you 
remember to pay the debt ? " has been a 
matter of much speculation : such as that it 
was a mere jest ; that it referred to a literal 
debt ; that it was a total relapse into super- 
stition. These explanations do not cover the 
case. Grant a sly humor as he turned to 
Crito, — it does not lessen the subHme gravity 
of the moment. The key is to be found in 
a previous remark. When the fatal cup was 
presented to him, he said to the jailer, " What 
do you say about making a libation out of 
this cup to any god ? " Being denied, he said : 
"Yet I may and must pray to the gods to 
prosper my journey from this to that other 
world ; may this, then, which is my prayer, 
be granted to me," and then, "he cheerfully 
drank off the poison " and went " to the joys 
of the blessed." But why an offering to ^Es- 
culapius ? Simply because it agreed with his 
high mood. He dies with cheerfulness and 



218 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

faith in the higher powers, — that is, reli- 
giously. Let the offering be to the god whose 
medicine I have just drunk, for it takes me 
not unwilHngly into another world. Such 
seems to be his meaning. It was not a tribute 
to custom, nor a return to superstition, nor 
something to profit him at the last, but a 
religious act in that supreme hour when one's 
nature calls out for religious expression. It 
does not matter whether Socrates himself or 
Plato is to be held accountable for the mas- 
terly close of the " Phsedo." If Plato wrote 
biographically, he was careful not to omit 
any detail of a religious character; if he 
wrote as a philosopher, he held it to be a 
necessary close to his argument for immor- 
tality. In either case his insight is as perfect 
as the art. If we mistake not, nearly all great 
men approach the close of life in a distinctly 
religious way. A full-rounded humanity de- 
mands such an end, and the great delineators 
of character accord it to all except the basest. 
Even Falstaff cried out, " God, God, God ! " 
and " 'a babbled of green fields," but whether 
of those in the Twenty-third Psalm, or those 
of his childhood, does not matter ; Shakespeare 
saw that it was fit to put him amid the hal- 



A COCK TO iESCULAPIUS 219 

lowed associations of early years, and make 
them call out a cry of nature after God. 

There is a deal of science that reduces death 
to a mere physical event of no significance ; 
but science has not yet compassed man. This 
instinctive tendency to speak religiously — as 
did Socrates — when death approaches, sheds 
light on a dispute now going on as to the 
nature of man. Is he the creature of his 
environment, and does he share in its fate of 
finiteness ? or does he belong to a divine and 
eternal order of which religion is the expo- 
nent ? The natural experience of man in this 
crisis leans heavily to the latter view, because 
death is so entirely a natural event ; and it is 
in the region of nature that we to-day look 
for confirming testimony. It has long been 
called the honest hour. What a man says at 
that time he believes. What he feels is sin- 
cere. The mists of time and circumstance are 
swept away, and all things stand out as they 
are. The entire man comes to himself, and 
he cannot be kept from expression. The 
flood-gates of tenderness open, and nature 
pours itself out in all its fullness. Grudges are 
forgotten ; no lie passes the lips. He returns 
to the genuine type of humanity. He passes 



220 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

judgment on himself, condemns the evil he 
has done, and craves nothing but forgiveness. 
He makes great decisions and achieves final 
conquests. He puts himself on the side of all 
that is pure and good, with no proviso or 
half-heartedness ; and when at last he goes 
hence, he is at peace with God and man and 
with himself also, for he has come back to 
primal relations that were meant to be eter- 
nal. This is brought out in " The Echpse 
of Faith," the author of which abridges the 
chapter in " Woodstock " where Scott so aptly 
touches this point : " Do you remember the 
passage in which our old favorite represents 
the Episcopalian Rochecliffe and the Presby- 
terian Holdenough meeting unexpectedly in 
prison, after many years of separation, during 
which one had thought the other dead ? How 
sincerely glad they were, and how pleasantly 
they talked ; when lo ! an unhappy reference 
to the bishopric of Titus gradually abated the 
fervor of their charity, and inflamed that of 
their zeal, even till they at last separated in 
mutual dudgeon, and sat glowering at each 
other in their distant corners with looks in 
which the ^Episcopalian and Presbyterian' 
were much more evident than * Christian;' 



A COCK TO iESCULAPIUS 221 

and so they persevered till the sudden sum- 
mons to them and their fellow prisoners, to 
prepare for instant execution, dissolved as with 
a charm the anger they had felt, and * Forgive 
me, my brother,' broke from their Hps as 
they took what they thought would be a last 
farewell." And so death annihilates the deep- 
est hatred, as if charged to open wide the 
portals for entrance into the world of love. 

Now, it is a great thing that one can thus 
return to the starting-point, and reestablish 
the integrity of his nature, and take up again 
its broken ideals. It is easy to say that it 
were better if it had been done earlier, and 
easy also to sneer at this time-enforced expe- 
rience, but the sneer is shallow, as most sneers 
are. Look at it more calmly. What is truer 
than that there come to men hours of self- 
revelation, — why, they cannot tell ; great ex- 
periences also that open men to the bottom 
of their souls, when they look down into each 
other to find a hidden man — unsuspected but 
real ? The moment passes, but, as a flash of 
lightning at night shows the entire landscape, 
the man is first and forever revealed. Then 
life and the custom of the world fold around 
him and he becomes once more what he had 



222 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

been ; yet not the same, for the divineness of 
his nature has been disclosed. It is then also 
that, as by instinct, he asserts a personal God 
and a spiritual universe : two things that make 
life exphcable as he looks back, and possible 
as he looks forward. The rite of extreme unc- 
tion is not a careless custom, and is a super- 
stition only as it is suffered to become one. 
It is administered on the ground that the first 
and main question of the priest is answered : 
" Do you die at peace with God and man ? '* 
Then the assurance of safe entrance into eter- 
nity can be granted ; and what better passport 
could be given? Thus, in a way, one is oriented 
and brought into harmony with both worlds. 
The rite means that a rational and immortal 
being comes into accord with all other beings. 
Thus the unity of creation is preserved, and 
man becomes a harmonious factor in a divine 
system. Montaigne, — worldhng as he was, — 
when the hour came, called for the last rites 
of the Church, and having risen as the Host 
was Hfted up, fell back upon his pillow, dead. 
Thus while he died a Christian death, if the 
Church can make one, in life he descanted on 
death as a philosopher, and said many wise 
things, — as well he might, for he was im- 



A COCK TO ^SCULAPIUS 223 

bued with a most unusual sense of it, — to 
such a degree that, as he says, being a medi- 
tative man, if anything came into his head 
when no more than a league's distance from 
his house, he made haste to write it down, be- 
cause he was not certain to Hve till he came 
home. But in all his pagan prattle of death 
he never belittles it, but ranks it with birth, 
and declares that life is only a preparation for 
it. He said : " In the judgment I make of 
another man's life, I always observe how he 
carried himself at his death ; and the principal 
concern I have for my own is that I may die 
well, — that is, patiently and tranquilly." In 
the manner of his going away, he was not 
making sure of heaven, but, as a clear-sighted 
man brought to still clearer vision by having 
reached the end and summit of life, he con- 
fessed that the proper way to leave the world 
was by acknowledgment of the supreme truths. 
No priest nor holy oil is needed to attest or 
perfect the act. Death itself prescribes the 
duty, and by its augustness inspires its fulfill- 
ment. The soul itself points the way, and tells 
what is to be done and undone, and so strives 
to dress itself in its most seemly robes as it 
goes hence. " Too late," does any one say ? 



224 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

It will be time to say that when it is proved 
that nature fools a man when he is most him- 
self and in his sorest strait. But we are not 
contending for the safety of it, but only that 
in the most honest hour of life man instinc- 
tively bears witness to the fact that he is akin 
to the infinite and eternal ; that the divine 
spark never goes out, or, if it finally goes out, 
it burns brightest at the end. The entire 
sanity of the Bible upon this subject is sig- 
nificant. The narrative of Christ's Hfe begins 
with a few legendary words on his birth, but 
grows minute on his approach to death, when 
every word is set down with careful accuracy. 
It does not matter where or when Christ was 
born, but what he said and did at the last 
is of infinite moment, because he then most 
fully revealed himself. One half of his words 
could better be spared than two sentences 
spoken upon the cross : " Father, forgive 
them, for they know not what they do ; " 
and, " Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit ; " — one, the supremest height human 
love ever reached ; the other, all that can be 
said or known of destiny, but it is enough. 

It marks an idle and a bHnd age and the 
oncoming of a degenerate one when men lose 



A COCK TO JESCULAPIUS 225 

that august sense of time and death that all 
men feel when left to the simplicity of their 
nature. We do not to-day treat a great fact 
fairly. We brave it with mock courage, and 
lower our nature by false estimates of a hu- 
manly cosmic event. We shut life within 
scientific measurements and functional activ- 
ities until neither beginning nor end inspires 
us with wonder and awe, — quoting proto- 
plasm for one and annihilation for the other. 
Or we prate about living well and leaving 
death to take care of itself, without question 
as to what life is or means. Not so do the 
great masters round out life, but keep it up 
to its dignity at the last. Shakespeare dis- 
misses great souls with triumphal honors, and 
lets their mistakes and defeats stand in the 
greatness of their real nature. With infallible 
touch he sets the true note to life and death 
in that most solemn of all dirges : 

" Thou thy worldly task hast done, 

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages." 

Surely one should pre-count them — small or 
great as may be. It becomes us as the years 
shorten the span, that we should number our 
days, — not afraid, nor grieving over the dis- 
solving tabernacle, nor in sullen resignation, 



226 ESSAYS FOR THE DAY 

nor yet in rapt joy over a future tliat may 
not be so rich and certain as we have dreamed, 
— for surely it will not be better than life 
has prepared the capacity for, — not in such 
ways, but rather for the moral values bound 
up with it. It is not an outworn prayer: 
" Lord, make me to know mine end, and the 
measure of my days what it is ; that I may 
know how frail I am." It is a prayer much 
needed and sorely neglected in these days of 
rich prosperity. When all things are going 
well, and one is hedged about with so many 
guards against the ills of life, the great dis- 
turbing forces are forgotten. The pangs of 
strenuous labor by which man is born into his 
heritage of strength are no longer felt, and 
the fatal slumber of inaction steals over us. 
All things are so sure and easy and comfort- 
able that the future is drawn into our soft 
visions and made as real as the things we 
handle. In this way we slip out of the king- 
dom of God, and hear no longer either the 
calls of duty or the notes of warning struck 
out by time and circumstance. Christ dropped 
no plummet deeper into human life than in 
that parable which grows truer with time, and 
more awful as men heap up riches heedless of 



A COCK TO ^SCULAPIUS 227 

their divine use. There is a great deal of this 
tearing down of barns and building greater 
going on at present, and the languorous 
chant, ^'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up 
for many years : take thine ease, eat, drink, 
and be merry," mingles strangely with the 
strenuous notes of work that fill the air. The 
present uses to which wealth is put reach far 
beyond the economic questions in which it is 
involved. They reach into our nature, and 
turn it aside from the path that leads toward 
life. The awful possibilities are couched in 
words that depict both condition and destiny, 
— " thou fool." He may not die this night ; 
it may be worse than that. He may live on, 
and sink deeper into his downy ease and 
count his goods with more fatal presumption ; 
each passing day the great meanings of life 
and time may grow fainter and fainter, until 
the very sense of humanity — his own and 
that of others — dies out within him. 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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